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.