It might help for you to first draw the scale in your notebook, placing the characters where you think they belong on the scale, and then in your online response to JE #6, explain your rationale for locating the characters where you did.
Be sure you have this assignment finished by Tuesday's class.
Mama Chona (10)
Miguel Grande (9)
Joel (9)
Juanita (7)
Miguel Chico (6)
Angie (5)
Nina (5)
Lena (5)
Lola (3)
Felix (2)
I surprise myself whn I put Felix all the way at the bottom, he's such an interesting character. But then again, this is such a dense work, once I read it again I'll probably have different opinions on how culturally schizophrenic and colonized all these characters are. But, since I am already starting from the bottom: Felix, I believe is the least culturally schizophrenic because of his actions. He is one of the few that doe not get crushed under oppressive familial expectations or any other expectations. As a young rain dancer, he is not afraid of being struck by lightning. He married Angie without his mother's blessing, who sees Angie as a low-class India. Felix obviously does not seem to care. And even though he is not openly queer with his family, he does not hide it from himself. Felix has had numerous homosexual encounters with other men, and this eventually does lead to his death. Speaking on the topic of sexuality, Lola is placed on the bottom for similar reasons. She is openly sexual with people, even with men in her own family. I probably won't forget the line (which I cannot find right now for the life of me!) where someone comments that they hate it when their aunt tries to push her tongue through their teeth as they kiss. As a woman, she is not afraid to exert her sexual desires, even if it ruins her best friend's marriage. The family, generally, is one big mess though. If they do not deal with individual internalized issues, then it something else. Joel and the other were placed up higher because their internal issues that relate to cultural schizophrenia and colonization exert themselves strongly. After Felix's death, Joel begins to have seizures and copes with his father's death with drugs. His level of cultural schizophrenia is apparent in the ways he tries to deal with his father's death, and how that relates to his inability do deal with the borders that were enacted between the culture he was brought up with in school that made him so rebellious and the love he easily once expressed to his father. Miguel Grande and Mama Chona I saw as the pioneers of the family's cultural schizophrenia as they embodied and upheld it. Miguel Grande's schizophrenia shows itself through his ardent internalized (and externalized) sexism towards women. he believes he has the right to do whatever he wants as a man and acts upon it with such a fierce tenacity that others believe that to be normal. His relationships with Juanita and Lola are a good example: everyone knows that he is cheating on his wife for her best friend, and they know it too, yet no one speaks about it at all. Miguel believe he has that right as a man to do so, regardless of who he hurts or colonizes. Mama Chona, however, seems to be the one that helped plant the seeds for this cultural schizophrenia. She is the one that taught Miguel Grande to act this way, as well as the women what their 'place was' and how they should act, especially when it comes to class and skin color. If you look like an 'Indian' (i.e. brown skinned like Felix's wife) then you are uglier, and if you are poor, then you are defunct.
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