Family as the patriarchal confinement of women in Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street and Loida M. Perez's Geographies of Home

• Autores: María Luisa Ochoa Fernández
• Localización: Evolving origins, transplanting cultures: literary Legacies of the news Americans / coord. por Laura Alonso Gallo; Antonia Domínguez Miguela (aut.), 2002, ISBN 978-84-95699-70-1, págs. 119-128
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This essay analyses the institution of the family in relation to women within the Chicano and Dominican-American communities in Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street (1983) and Loida Maritza Perez's Geographies of Home (1999). In both cases, the familial space is presented as one of oppression and confinement, in which fathers and husbands make them submit to strict patriarchal roles, forcing them to become nothing else other than wives and mothers and consequently, shattering any possibility of them discovering their true self. Thus, in these Latino immigrant communities in the United States the family emerges as being hostile towards women's needs, enslaving them to those of others (fathers', husbands', sons'...) Women's reactions are polarised into submission and rebellion. The essay analyses both although concentrates on the latter so as to emphasise that the familial links are not so easy to get rid of. These women who dare to rebel come to the realisation, as paradoxical as it may seem, that, despite their families' oppressiveness towards them, they are, at the same time, an essential part of their lives to the extent that they will never be able to completely break free from the ties binding them to their families whether they like it or not. In an unwelcoming world, in which everybody is drifting and rootless, their Latino families (with their customs and traditions) provide them with a feeling of belonging and the only roots these women have in a country where everything is distant and unknown. So the family, apart from being a source of never-ending unhappiness, also emerges as an eternal tie essential for their self-understanding which leads the protagonists to establish a hate-love relationship with them, as they grow and struggle to survive. It is this twofold nature of the Latino family this paper aims at exploring although the negative aspects of the family are overwhelmingly dominant in both works.