In Never Marry a Mexican, Sandra Cisneros' protagonist, Clemencia, begins her story by recounting something her mother had told her: "never marry a Mexican.” In the following sentences, she explains the irony by specifying that she too is Mexican. Clemencia struggles internally to decipher what this four-word advice her mother gave her actually means to her as a woman longing for love and as a Mexican longing for a sense of identity. Through her sexuality, which she uses almost as a weapon, we see a woman capable of causing harm as a means of protecting herself, to seek her worth. Following her mother's advice and her own reaction to the racist environment around her, Clemencia appears to present an almost internalized and toxic racist view of people of color and what they seem to represent to her, namely " the other.” As a survival mechanism, she seems to detach herself from her own race and attempt to find her own identity within the white hemisphere to which she does not belong as well as the brown hemisphere to which she feels she does not belong. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The story begins with a short sentence that reveals an aspect of the root of his internal struggle. Cisneros begins with “never marry a Mexican, my mother told me once and forever.” By saying “once and forever,” Clemencia points out that these words were used repeatedly in their household. This is reflected throughout the text when Clemencia also reminds the audience of these words several times throughout the text. When Clemencia's mother tells her not to marry a Mexican, Clemencia focuses on her own interpretation of those words at the beginning of the next paragraph when she says, "I will never marry." Not just any man. This bitter tone already begins to reveal part of the internalization that Clemencia seems to feel. For her, no man is good enough for her, in general. We soon discover that for Clemencia, never marrying a “Mexican” means not marrying someone who is not white, someone who is considered “other” in the United States. These flashes of hatred towards people of color, towards minorities, manifest themselves in the men she chooses to have sex with. Her mother was not the only source of her internalized racist view of Mexicans and other people of color, Clemenica explains, “she [her mother] said that because of my father. She said this even though she was also Mexican. But she was born here in the United States and he was born there, and it’s not the same, you know.” Early on, Clemencia recognizes that part of what makes Mexicans "modest" in her eyes is their status when they come to live in the United States, which is reinforced in her mind by the relationship with her parents. In the following paragraphs, Clemencia explains how her mother was treated by her father's family as second class "because she was from El Otro Lado", and makes the distinction that "if he had married a white woman from El Otro Lado, it would have been different. Clemencia sarcastically points out how ridiculous it was that a Mexican couldn't speak Spanish or fold cloth napkins; she finds it ridiculous that her mother was deemed incapable of respect by her in-laws because she was born in another country. In the story, the differences in how Clemencia's mother and father ate fruit further reinforce Clemencia's perception of her own race. and subsequent self. The mother and the grandfatherde Clemencia used to eat watermelons "with their legs wide open in the yard or in the kitchen, squatting in front of the newspaper." His father, for his part, was accustomed to “a house in Mexico where the servants served watermelon on a plate with cutlery and a cloth napkin.” In her “mother’s house, the plates were always stacked in the center of the table, the knives, forks and spoons placed in a jar”. It is, status-wise, different from his father's "shark blue" suits with the starched handkerchief in the breast pocket, his felt fedora, his tweed overcoat with big shoulders and heavy British wingtips with the pinhole pattern on the heel and toe. These small differences, in terms of culture and status, contribute to the overall unstable relationship between mother and father, which impacts how Clemencia views relationships as an adult and how she deals with people of one's own ethnicity and people outside of one's ethnicity. In this sense, Clemencia saw with her own eyes what her mother was talking about. For Clemencia, the decision to avoid and demean "others" (minorities like herself) in the United States, and ultimately her choice not to marry, can be seen as coming from a position of force, but in reality, Clemencia may be acting in rebellion because she does not feel like she belongs to her people. If Mexicans in Mexico demean Mexicans like Clemencia and her mother, born in “el otro lado,” what is the place of someone like Clemencia? However, Clémencia was not always at odds with the marriage and this is where we begin to feel sympathy for her. She “wanted to belong to a man…with her toothbrush planted firmly in the toothbrush holder like a flag at the North Pole.” The world around her, including her parents, made her jaded toward love, going so far as to berate herself for saying the word love: "I did it." When her father fell ill with a fatal illness, her mother met another man whom she “saw even when [her] father was ill. Even then.” Clemencia explains the extreme shame she feels by saying "even then" about her mother seeing the man while her father was ill. “Once dad left, it was as if my mother no longer existed, as if she had died too…” There is a feeling of disappointment towards his mother, because when his father died, it was at this moment -where they needed her the most, but instead she disappeared emotionally. For her, she lost her father physically, and to make matters worse, she lost her mother emotionally. Suddenly, she finds herself alone facing the death of her father. At the same time, Clémencia blames her father for having caused such a separation. She has been prepared her entire life to see her mother feel unworthy by her father's family. Clemencia may have understood that cultural differences led to her mother's affair and an emotional departure from their family. More importantly, deep down, she may have thought that she had to respect her mother's rule because in her eyes, her mother had moved on to another man and that's how she also has to deal with the pain. Structurally, as the narrative progresses from her parents' relationship, there is a break in the text as she begins to speed up time toward her own relationships. The alienation and relationship status of her own parents makes Clemenica a man's "other woman." When Clémence is seen with a man, it is a man who already has a wife and a son. In her description of the man she is having an affair with, she says: "Drew, remember when you called me your.