Essay #1 Reflection

The essay that I just finished was about what kind of pop culture artifacts make us happy in life. I think the way the essay evolved during the revision process is that during the first draft I was very intimidated about the topic and didn’t really know what to mention in my essay, but as I came to my second draft I had a lot of different ideas and good points I wanted to input in my essay. What I have learned about writing as a result doing this essay is to never lack supporting details for songs I was writing about, I needed to elaborate a little more, on why my three chosen songs and why they were important for this essay. I feel my writing has changed as a result of this essay is that I know understand that I must always restate my thesis statement even at the end of my essay to keep the reader on the same page of what my essay was about and make sure the essay makes since from beginning to end. What I will do differently next time is plan out my essay a little more before I begin to write it out, I feel it will help me come up with more points to put in my essay. I think what I struggle with the must in my essays is that I forget to make sure the details and the thesis points are in order and that I must write my paragraphs from least important to most important. But I feel I have succeeded the most in understanding to sticking to my thesis statement and making all my paragraphs relate to my statement I first made. Also to make an argument that my audience can agree with or argue against.

The Myth of a Latin Woman

In the story, “The Myth of a Latin Woman” is about the author Judith Ortiz Cofer talking about her life and growing up as a Puerto Rican girl. She talks about the struggles she had to go throw, like always being under heavy surveillance by her family. She would be under their watch because she was a girl and was expected to protect her family’s honor and to behave like in her family’s terms “proper senorita”. She was forced to mature fast just at her teenage years. Cofer could never act her age, she had to act and dress older then all her friends. Her life in every way was different then all the other girls she knew, because she stood out so much. Also in her life because she was a Puerto Rican woman she was always labeled and stereotyped. Cofer said Latin women were always concerned as “sizzling” and “Smoldering” that Latin women were supposed to be red-hot fireballs, that’s what outside cultures saw them as. Later on when Cofer became older she had experienced two different situations where she was stereotyped. The first was having a man singing an offense old Spanish song to her called “La Bamba” about a girl named Maria with gonorrhea. The second time was when she got the chance to read a poem of hers at a public poetry reading dinner, and a woman that was sitting a table had mistaken her for a waiter, just because she was Spanish and holding a hand full off papers. She refused to let that bring her down still because at the end of the day she would always be proud of who she was and where she came from.

My response to this story is that I feel it is shocking of how much Latin women are labeled. They are expected to be something they are not, not all Latin women want to curse and fight every day. Not all want to be saw as sexy sex objects and will do anything to get that type of attention. The author just wants the world to stop viewing her as just a Latin woman who is suppose to walk around half naked and have no values. She wants to be seen as a person who can accomplish great things and always get the job done, she wants to more than just the little Puerto Rican girl she had to grow up as.

Black Men in Public Spaces

In my life, I have had no personal experience of the story “Black men and Public places”, but I have seen someone else in that situation. My father was in that situation, I was 12 years when I witnessed what happened to my father. We were at a blockbuster one day getting a couple of movies to watch together later, we got there and found some movies we wanted to see. We got to the front of the store and there was a long line of customers, so my father and I took our place in line. We were the last people in line, soon after some else was behind us on line, it was an Asian woman, I soon got bored of standing in the line so I told my dad I was going over to the stand where the magazines were. He said okay and I got out of the line, I went over to look through some magazines and turned back around to the line were dad was standing, and noticed the woman had moved a couple of feet away from my dad. She would look up at the back and forth at my dad and clutch her purse a little and the movies she was buying closer to her every minute. My dad always had a habit of rocking back and forth if he stood to long so he would step an inch back, and so would the Asian woman just so she was careful to be not to stand too close to him. While I was trying to process everything in my head of what I was saw I wanted to know why this woman acting so strange. I wanted to know did my dad smell funny. Have a contagious disease, what was the problem? At that age I couldn’t put all the pieces to that puzzle together, but now I know what it was the woman was scared or imitated by my dad because he was a black man and black men are always profiled as thieves, rude people and ignorant. I will never understand why people have to have this kind of mentality, but we are just people and not everyone is the same.