Miguel Chico

Going by the fact that Miguel Chico is not married, he hardly visits his family in the desert and only does so during special occasions. This is one of the factors that lead some of his family members to believe that he is a homosexual. Despite this negative attitude, his family is very proud of him and his academic achievements that are significantly outstanding and require recognition. Miguel Chico enjoys a good relationship with his mother Juanita, but the same cannot be said for his father Miguel Grande. This is because during his childhood, his father had always been very strict in the sense that he wanted to make his son a real man.

This is the main reason why Miguel had to apologize to his father for time he played with his dolls. In a rather isolated incidence, Miguel Grande prohibited Juanita to take Mickie to a doctor, since he thought that his son only pretended to be sick. Due to this, Miguel acquired a slight limp as a result of polio infection and he has to bear the rest of his life with the limp. In addition, according to the author, Miguel Grande is seen as having failed in raising Miguel Chico to be the man he ought to be in the sense that he refused to acknowledge that Miguel Chico’s feelings and needs might be different from his own ones and wanted to make his son fulfill the dream he had never been able to let come true (pp. 67) One of the most problematic issues of significance in Miguel Chico’s life is death.

Before the death of his friend Leonardo, Miguel did not seem to understand the concept of death. He had thought that people turned into stones and sand after their death, going by the stories that he had heard since his childhood. In addition, his coming into contact on a number of occasions such as when he was being operated opens the door for him to view and comprehend what death really meant. The author portrays Miguel Chico as seeing everybody, including himself, as a book, hence his perception that he can edit and correct people in order to make them behave in an appropriate manner. “Thus we can assume Mickie is the rain god who brings the dead to life by telling the story of the family members” (pp. 273).

Fe, in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God, is the starkest example of how radicalized rhetoric on the job affects women specifically (pp.3) Fe speech depics the speech of a woman who is held by cultural bounds and family ties that hinder her form achieving her life objectives. Fe changes the manner in which she communicates, changing her speech patterns that are characterized by a consistent absence of sound. However, her family is still supportive of her and still understands her as she is which makes it hard for herself to realize the true extent of her new problem. After working for a few years, Fe realizes that her job is not taking her anywhere in life with respect to how she wanted her life to be.

As Castillo writes, Fe considered herself the steady and dedicated worker type, always giving her one hundred percent to the job, even when she was passed up twice for promotion at the bank and remained in new accounts without so much as a prospect to get a real raise(pp. 177). In this book, race is used as an intensification factor for Fe’s inability to climb the corporate ladder. This is to show just how sex and race have affected her life as a whole as well as her achievements in life.During the most instances, Fe seems to contend with some of the assignments she is assigned.

With each job she agrees to, whether it is cleaning parts with suspicious fluids or being relegated to the depths of the company to scrub parts with a solution, her boss calls ‘ether,’ and enduring the long hours of time alone, her health worsens (pp. 77). This is what leads her to having a miscarriage while a suspicious odor of glue is said to cling on her. However, one of the most striking characteristic of Fe is her perception of her superiors. When she asks the foreman about the feasibility of working with ‘ether’ and avoiding unconsciousness when using it, he answers “with a bit of a smile as if as usual a subordinate was asking a stupid question” (pp.182).

The foreman seems to come into numerous conflicts with Fe as a matter of work related problems. At one such occurrence, Fe fails to dispose the toxic chemical as she directed , “he instructed her then, like she was stupid instead of having only been following the order given by all the other supervisors,” the narrator notes (pp. 185). Fe’s life is marked by her deteriorating health while at the same time suffering the cultural imbalance in the society that she lives in. There is little flow of information hence the reason why she continuously uuses hazardous materials in her work in complete disregard of the effects of the chemicals on her general health. The lack of information is seen to be part of a larger system of the inherent patriarchal bias against women in the workplace as well as Fe’s race and position in society.

Fe unprecedented death comes as a result of the deteriorating working conditions in the sense that her death is brought by the utter disregard of the woman’s place in the society. Despite the fact that her death is brought by a natural cause, we cannot ignore the fact that Fe is trapped in a society that diminishes her potential as a complete citizen and societal participant. Family dynamics come into play in both of these books in the context that the characters in the book are supported by their families despite the rather unorthodox life they have taken. It is a fact that the family is the smallest basic unit. This unit is responsible for the cohesion that exists in the society. Going by the said fact, Miguel Chico seems to enjoy the support of his family despite the fact that he lives far away from them and only visits his family on selected occurrences.

His failure to acquire a wife also drives some of the family members to have the perception that he is a homosexual. Despite all this negatives tags by his family, the family members are very proud of him due to both his academic and life achievements. This is one of the reasons that towards the end of the story, Miguel seems to change his earlier perspective regarding other people and life in general. He, towards the end, is seen as an individual who binds the Angel family together going by the fact that their mother had tried to do so since the Mexican revolution but failed terribly.Fe, in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God, also lives a life that is without any sense of moral standing or obligation.

She comes out as character who concentrates more on her work, in comparison with the issues that affects her and her family. Her family is very supportive of her and endeavor a situation that is clearly painted in the many family dinners that her family had together. As stated in her speech, this is the only moment that the members of the big family that included her father, stepmother, and husband, as well as other family members, came together and had a moment regarding the life issues facing them.