Internalized Racism in Never Marry a Mexican by Sandra Cisneros

In Never Marry a Mexican, Sandra Cisneros’s protagonist Clemencia begins her narrative by recounting something her mother had told her: “never marry a Mexican”. In the next few sentences she explains the irony by clarifying that she, too, is Mexican. Clemencia internally struggles to decipher what that four-word advice, her mother gave her truly means to her as a woman yearning for love, and as a Mexican yearning for a sense of identity. Through her sexuality, which she uses almost as a weapon, we see a woman capable of causing hurt as a means to protect herself, in order to seek her worth. As a result of her mother’s advice and her own reaction to the racist environment around her, Clemencia seems to exhibit an almost internalized, toxic racist view of brown people, and what they seem to represent to her, which is the “other.” As a survival mechanism, she seems to detach herself from her own race and try to find her own identity within the white hemisphere she does not belong to as well as the brown hemisphere she feels she does not belong to.

The story starts off with a short sentence that reveals an aspect of the root of her internal struggle. Cisneros starts off with, “never marry a Mexican, my ma said once and always”. By saying “once and always” Clemencia emphasizes that those words were repeatedly used in their household. This is mirrored throughout the text when Clemencia reminds the audience of these words repeatedly throughout the text as well. When Clemencia’s mother tells her to not marry a Mexican, Clemencia zeros in on her own interpretation of those words at the start of the next paragraph when she says “I’ll never marry. Not any man.” This bitter tone already begins to expose some of the internalization Clemencia seems to be feeling. For her, no man is good enough for her, in general. We soon find out that that never marrying a “Mexican” for Clemencia means not marrying anyone who is not white, anyone who is considered “other” in the United States. These flashes of loathing for people of color, for minorities, manifest itself in the men she chooses to have sex with. Her mother was not only source of her internalized racist view of Mexicans and other brown people, Clemenica explains, “she [her mother] said this because of my father. She said this though she was Mexican too. But she was born here in the U.S. and he was born there, and it’s not the same, you know”. From the very start, Clemencia acknowledges that a part of what makes Mexicans “lowly” to her is their status when they come and live in the U.S., which is reinforced in her mind by her parents’ relationship. In the following paragraphs, Clemencia explains how her mother was treated by her father’s family as second class “because she from el otro lado,” and making the distinction that “if he had married a white woman from el otro lado, that’d would’ve been different”. Clemencia points out, in a sarcastic tone, how ridiculous it was that a Mexican woman could not 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 a different country.

In the story, the differences in the way Clemencia’s mother and father ate fruit, further reinforces Clemencia’s perception of her own race and subsequent self. Clemencia’s mother and grandfather were accustomed to eating watermelons “with legs wide open in the yard, or in the kitchen hunkered over newspaper”. Her father, on the other hand, was used to “home in Mexico City where the servants served watermelon on a plate with silverware and a cloth napkin”. In her “ma’s house the plates were always stacked in the center of the table, the knives and forks and spoons standing in a jar”. This is, status wise, different than her father who wore “shark blue suits with the starched handkerchief in the breast pocket, his felt fedora, his tweed topcoat with the big shoulders, and heavy British wing tips with the pin hole design on the heel and toe”. These small differences, culturally and status wise, contribute to the overall unstable relationship of the mother and father, which impacts how Clemencia views relationships as an adult and how she deals with people of her own ethnicity and people outside of her ethnicity. In this sense, Clemencia has seen what her mother was talking about first hand. For Clemencia the decision to avoid and belittle the “others” (minorities like herself) in the U.S. and ultimately her choice to not marry, can be seen to come out of a place of strength, but in reality, Clemencia may be acting out in rebellion as a result of not feeling like she belongs to her own kind. If Mexicans from Mexico belittle Mexicans like Clemencia and her mother who were born in “el otro lado,” where does someone like Clemencia fit? However, Clemencia was not always in disapproval of marriage and this is where we start to feel sympathy for her. She “wanted to belong to a man…with his toothbrush firmly planted in the toothbrush holder like a flag on the north pole”. The world around her, including her parents, made her jaded towards love, going as far as berating herself for saying the word love, “I’ve gone and done it”. When her father had fallen ill with a deadly illness, her mother had met another man who she “was seeing even while [her] father was sick. Even then”. Clemencia explains the extreme shame she feels by saying “even then” about the fact that her mother was seeing the man while her father was sick. “Once Daddy was gone, it was like my ma didn’t exist, like if she died, too…” There is a sense of disappointment towards her mother, that when her father died, that is when they needed her the most, but instead she emotionally disappeared. For her, she physically lost her father and to make matters worse, she lost her mother emotionally.

Suddenly, she is alone to deal with the death of her father. At the same time, Clemencia blames her father for causing such a separation. She was set up her whole life to see her mother be a victim of feeling unworthy at the hands of her father’s family. Clemencia may have understood that the differences in culture led to her mother’s affair and emotional departure from their family. Most importantly, deep down, she may have thought that she needed to abide by her mother’s rule because in her eyes her mother had moved on to another man and that is how she needs to deal with pain as well. Structurally, as the narrative progresses from her parent’s relationship, there is a break in the text as she begins to speed up time to her own relationships. The alienation and the state of her own parent’s relationship shapes Clemenica to be the “other woman” for a man. When Clemencia is seen with a man, it is a man that 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 used to call me your Malinalli… because you looked like a Cortez with that beard of yours”. She already begins codifying this relationship as a racial one, which seems to excite her. In the physical description of their sexual intercourse, she applies highly sensual language to describe the beauty in the way their skins contrast each other, his black beard likened to that of Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortez. She urges him to continue calling her “Malinalli,” referring to it as a “private game between them”. Malinalli refers to the indigenous woman who aided Cortez as a medium between the indigenous and Spanish people, and bore his children. This urging on of racial labels and physical reverence of the white man she is fooling around with seems to display how she views herself as a means to please, that she is serving a white man, who she understands from the environment around her and her own experiences is superior, and a potential lover. Yet, the white man has no intentions of leaving his wife for the protagonist, “before daybreak, you’d be gone, same as always, before I even knew it”.

The white man abandoning her after sex reaffirms her perception and internalizing of her self-worth. The way she knows best to react to these feelings of abandonment seems to be through sex with the white man’s son. Clemencia admits, “I sleep with this boy, their son. To make the boy love me the way I love his father”. Clemencia uses the present tense to say she loves his father still, creating a conflicting sense in her motives of using the son. Is she doing this because she still loves him? Or because he left her? It seems to be both, but for her, once again being an actor in a power dynamics is what seems to be driving her. Clemencia says, “I can tell from the way he looks at me, I have him in my power. Come, sparrow… Come to mamita… I don’t move. I don’t startle him. I let him nibble… before I snap my teeth”. Her role in the power dynamic almost seems predatory as she even refers to him as a “sparrow,” which is a tiny bird. Interestingly, in the following paragraph when she is describing the phone call she is making to white man (the father), she also refers to herself as a bird that is being startled. She seems to project her lack of self-worth and her neglect onto the son, creating a co-dependency. What this seems to be saying, once again, is that if she is depended on, if she is serving the white man, she is ultimately of value. Clemencia does not want to feel like the small, tiny sparrow anymore.

Clemencia realizes she ultimately wants to be held and truly loved. She does not know how to do it and refers to the fact that she is not like her sister Ximena, “I’m not like Ximena. I still haven’t worked it out after all this time, even though our mother’s dead now”. She was unable to understand how her mother could also abandon them as their father was dying and marry a white man when he died. She once again uses the image of a small bird, this time she likens her mother to the little finch she had when she was a child, “I used to have a little finch, twisted one of its tiny red legs between the bars of the cage once. The leg just dried up and fell off. My bird lived a long time without it, just a little red stump of a leg. My mother’s memory is like that…”. Her mother’s emotional unavailability made her as good as dead to Clemencia which she harbored inside and hated her for it. Clemencia’s survival mechanism up until this point was slowly being undone as her internalized emotions were coming to the surface. The white men she learned to idolize as she was growing up were abandoning her as well. Finally, at the end of the text, she lets herself be vulnerable with the audience, explaining her observations, “Human beings pass me on the street, and I want to reach out and strum them as they were guitars”. The same Clemencia that was using a boy to get back at his father, who likened herself to a predator, reaches a point at the end of the text in which she lets go and admits, in words this time, that “just wants to reach out and stroke someone, and say There, there, it’s all right, honey”. She does not sexualize them or likens them to prey, she is soft. She wants what she did not have her whole life, someone to stroke her and reassure that it is okay. She wants to feel worthy of love despite being a part of the “other” in the United States.