The story presents the life of Cleófilas who is a Mexican woman and a wife. Cleófilas acquires the knowledge of becoming a woman through telenovelas as she is raised in a home with no mother but with her father and six brothers. Through the programs, she longs for passion in her life whereby she will love and be loved back so that her life will have meaning. She tells herself, “One does whatever one can, must do, at whatever the cost… because to suffer for love is good. The pain was all sweet somehow. In the end,” (Cisneros 1401) with the view that that is how life is supposed to be. However, her life changes when she moves to Texas with her husband whereby every person is a stranger and unwilling to provide support to her. She stays in a home that is isolated in addition to lacking personal transportation. Through the lessons, she had obtained from the telenovelas on being a good wife, she adjusts to living with Juan and they end up having a son, Juan Pedrito. Nonetheless, their life in Texas is not smooth as Juan has a job that pays little and uses the frustration to beat up Cleófilas. He continues beating her even after she becomes pregnant for the second time. The woman in this story is powerless such that she must depend on her husband and endure the torture presented to herself and her children. Cleófilas realizes that life was not as she had pictured it when watching …show more content…
The narrator uses fiction to illustrate the situation that faced immigrants at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Some of the themes in the story include; breakage of cultural bonds between immigrants and their families, challenges faced by Japanese immigrants located in America, in addition to the limitations imposed on Japanese women in America in regards to the Japanese culture. The author puts into perspective the Exclusion Act of 1924 imposed on Asian countries despite the Japanese being welcomed on the U.S. soils. Most of the Japanese men by then had no wives, and hence the only option they had was to send what they had earned to Japan to bring brides to the U.S. whom they didn’t know physically but only through phone calls. The problem arose when the couples became incompatible and hence had to bare each other in marriages. The woman, in this case, had no one to associate with so she spends most of her time alone, taking care of household duties and bearing children. The differences between Rosie and her mother represent the gap between the immigrants and their children born in American soils. Rosie is unable to comprehend her mother’s behavior in regards to her Japanese cultural background. The story highlights the challenges that immigrant women went through during her stay in the U.S. and what she had to sacrifice to adjust to the new environments and meet the needs