Monsters, LatinX, and Myself Trying to Figure This All Out.

  Falling in Love with a Fish. Yes, You Read that Right.   The Shape of Water is a great film. It examines what it means to be human, the racial tensions of the 1950s, and the Cold War. The film captures the romantic relationship between an aquatic sea creature and a cleaning lady. It’s romantic, cute, yet utterly heartbreaking. By depicting an interspecies love affair, Del Toro suggests that humanity lies in one’s ability to be compassionate.  The film’s lead character, Elisa, is mute and is able to communicate solely through sign language. This, however, poses no barriers in communication between herself and her lover. In conversation with her friend Giles, Elisa pleads for him to help her lover escape from the government agency where he is held captive. He replies that she would like to “save every fish in the tank” (45:24 Del Toro). Note that in this instance, the sea creature is considered below that of humanity because he does not appear human. This suggests th...

  Please No One Grab the Calipers. Please!  Mexican Gothic is beautifully written and I recommend it to anyone. This novel redefines the gothic genre by adding a LatinX twist to it. The protagonist is Noemí, a Mexican woman who must help her cousin in mental distress. She travels to the mountainous town of El Triunfo and lodges with her cousin, Catalina, her husband, Virgil, and the rest of his family. Virgil’s father, Howard, has a particular interest in eugenics. By describing Howard’s obsession with the creation of a “cosmic race” and embedding references to phrenology throughout the text, Moreno-Garcia conveys the inhumane nature of eugenics.  Early in the text, Noemi meets Howard, Virgil’s father, and he suggests there will be a superior race of people in the future. He suggests that one day Mexico will form a “cosmic race” and that Noemi is a “good example of that sort” (Moreno-Garcia 30). Note that this “cosmic race” may only be created through the mixing of indig...

  #NotAllMen? Her Body and Other Parties is interesting, I guess. Throughout the novel, she examines femininity and its place in a world dominated by men and the sexualization of women. “The Husband Stitch” was particularly interesting to me and will be the focus of this blog post.  First, by metaphorizing the ribbon as femininity, the writer suggests that a woman’s femininity is under the constant threat of a man’s control, and that succumbing to this control is deadly. In the middle of the chapter, the narrator’s husband touches the ribbon on her neck. She states that her husband “touches her bow delicately” as if he is massaging her “sex” (12 Machado). Note that the narrator describes the ribbon around her neck as her “sex”. This indicates that the narrator’s ribbon represents her femininity, and in a more literal sense, her vagina. The narrator allows her husband to caress the ribbon around her neck, and is prohibited from removing it. However, the husband desires to remov...

  The Erasure of Indigenous History The Tears of the Truffle-Pig by Fernando A. Flores is excellent. I cannot put this book down and I am utterly in love with it. The novel examines the mythological Aranana tribe and their origins in North America. The descendents of this tribe are being hunted in the novel. Syndicate agencies are decapitating them and selling their heads for extremely high prices. By depicting the Aranana tribe within a mythological context, Flores portrays the erasure of indigenous history. During Bellacosa’s time at a dinner party, where filtered animals were served, he converses with a woman about the Aranana tribe. A record for the tribe’s existence fails to exist and most people know little about their origin. The woman states that “nobody [is] really sure that they existed” and that they returned to society from “the desert” (123-124 Flores). The text suggests that the origin for the Aranana tribe is largely unknown. They are described as not having a record...

  Love = Death. Time and time again narratives about love end in death. Society’s obsession with this fatalistic concept of love does not seem to have dissipated in recent years. For my class this week, I had to read What You See in the Dark , which I thought was utterly fantastic. The glamor of old Hollywood and its horrifyingly dark underbelly pulled me into this novel and kept me engaged until its ending. I took a particular interest in the very beginning and end of the book, and their various similarities. In this blog post, I’m going to examine the first and last pages of the book and the novel’s epigraph and what these demonstrate about the text as a whole.  First, Munoz suggests that love has a fatalistic quality. Before the novel begins, there is an epigraph that reads: if the thirst for love is not the thirst for death, then what is it? (Ai “Last Seen”). Note that this is a pretext for the rest of the novel, and this novel has various depictions of romantic relati...

  What is a Man? Examining Masculinity in Dominican Culture By demonstrating Oscar Wao’s inability to meet the cultural standard of masculinity and the manner in which some Dominican men perceive women, Diaz demonstrates that Dominican masculinity may be toxic, exclusive, and disregards women.  First, by demonstrating Oscar’s inability to meet the cultural standard of masculinity, Diaz demonstrates the exclusive nature of masculinity in Dominican culture and its disregard for women. In the first part of the novel, the writer examines Oscar’s appearance and the limitations it poses to his relationships. The narrator states that Oscar had none of the “higher powers of your typical Dominican male” (19 Diaz) and that he “threw ball like a girl” (20). This quote suggests that Oscar possesses none of the qualities of a desirable Dominican man. He does not have the “power” necessary for him to do so. Additionally, this quote examines what it means to be a “typical Dominican male”. It...