A Strong Woman Vs A Woman of Strength
 
  A strong woman works out every day to
 keep her body in shape...but a   woman
  of strength builds relationships to
  keep her soul in shape.
 
  A strong woman isn't afraid of
  anything... but a woman of strength
  shows courage in the midst of her fear.

A strong woman won't let anyone get
the best of her... but a woman of strength
gives the best of herself to everyone.
 
  A strong woman makes mistakes and
  avoids the same in the future... a
  woman of strength realizes life's
  mistakes can also be unexpected
  blessings and capitalizes on them.
 
  A strong woman wears a look of
  confidence on her face... but a woman
  of strength wears grace.
 
  A strong woman has faith that she is
  strong enough for the journey... but a
  woman of strength has faith that it is in
  the journey that she will become strong.


*This Paper is dedicated to all the Women of Strength that I have come to know…

What characterizes a woman of strength?  The way she carries her head high?  The tone of her voice?  The fearless look in her eyes?  The strength of a woman is not measured by the tangible or the aesthetic.  Woman is strong because she is the essence of our life: the carrier of life and culture, she is the heart of all things, her backbone carries the scores of labor, and she still remains the gentlest of creatures to grace the earth.  Today’s woman is not just a companion, she is an equal, she is empowered and she seeks her own destiny.  It is through traditional literature and social institutions that women have been assigned the role of the “passive creature.”  Yet, within this context literature and life begin to coalesce and provide a better understanding of “women” and what shapes the lives of today’s woman.  Every woman has a journey and it is through these passages that we come to know the extraordinary strength, courage, and will of women. 
    
When we look at the woman of the Dominican Republic today, we see a determination, liberty and strength that have been passed down for many generations with in the Dominican culture.  The moral value and behavioral attitudes of many contemporary Dominican women lead us to question where these beliefs and attitudes came from.  What constructs the moral fibers and social standing of today’s Dominican woman?  What makes them different than the Dominican women in the past and of Dominican women on the island?  These questions lead us to wonder whether it is the assumed moral values that are instilled in Latinas that cause their behavior, or the manner in which each generation is raised.  No doubt we have to look back into the past and into the way values influenced how the women were raised and how that in turn made the women they are today.  We must also look at the way the migration as a consequence of personal, financial, and emotional hardships and the subsequent Americanization of Dominican women has influenced both the older and younger generations and how the effects of cultural and moral differences have ushered drastic changes in today’s Dominican women.  This paper explores the journey, image, and identification of Dominican women in reality, fiction, and in scholarly feminist writing.   
   
Throughout this paper we will see how these women’s paths, though conceived from the same root, became opposite roads of life.  We will analyze how Dominican women of the same socio-economic background, were able to change their roles and the roles of their daughters and subsequent generations through social/personal change, migration to the ever-promising United States and life-long lessons.  I will focus on Nelly Rosario’s: Song of the Water Saints, the tale of three generations of Dominican women who wander in search of adventure self-worth, and happiness. Each woman struggles with the ideals of womanhood set by the women before her and each is determined to maintain control of their individual fates.  I have also interviewed Maria Valdez, a Dominican woman to learn more about her upbringing and how that has affected her as a woman, mother, and wife.  I have also found essential sources on the Caribbean Feminist movement and identity such as: Out of Kumbla, Women in Hispanic Literature, Bending the Rules in the Quest for an Authentic Female Identity.  This will be a means to conceptualize the Dominican woman for who she was, who she is, and who she is becoming. 

Women in Fiction

Graciela

In Nelly Rosario’s sensual and sincere novel she encompasses the themes of self-respect, freedom, responsibility, and family from the lush isle of the Dominican Republic to the streets of New York.  The story follows the journey of three generations of women: Graciela (the free-willed mother), Mercedes (the devote daughter), and Leila (the American raised Great-Granddaughter).  Each woman struggles to define herself while dealing with the traits inherited from the woman before her.

Graciela was the tempestuous daughter of a poor farmer in the Dominican Republic.  Graciela had, “the ocean in her eyes” and the strength to carve a man.  Graciela’s need to have more of life than was given to her as a peasant girl came from the issues and horrific experiences she witnessed.  Graciela had seen a friend of hers be shot to death and raped in the outskirts of her village by yanqui-men that occupied the Dominican Republic.  Those same men had broken Graciela’s nose, beaten her mother and accosted her young brother in their own home.  Graciela had often been whipped by her father for insolent behavior and been told to, “cry hard, satisfy your mai;” yet Graciela did not cry nor confess to the travesties no one knew she had committed.  These beatings and the suffocation of her free spirit led her to find freedom the only way she knew how…with a man.

Escaping the home of her mai and pai to live with her teenage lover Silvio was the only option that Graciela had at her disposal.  Living as husband and wife proved difficult especially when Graciela was expected to follow the orders of her new husband.  Graciela’s brazen will continually created problems with her husband, her family, and often her friends.  When Silvio gave Graciela back to her father before he embarked on a ship she reminded him that she did not have to, “swallow my own spit ‘cause you wanna fish!”  She defied the standards that women were forced to follow at the time and she never cared about what people said about her.  The women of the town could always set their tongues on Graciela and her ways: That poor girl is lazier than an upper jaw…show me her pots and I’ll show you her bed…That fool is wasting her life on that other fool. Yet, throughout the talk of the friends and neighbors Graciela was adamant about forgetting dirty tongues, they were everywhere and she did not care.

When Graciela became pregnant, “the new life inside of her pulled her daydreams down from the clouds.”  She decided that she would be the creator of her own fate; she would make her own house and call on Silvio, “to show him that she was not a woman to be kept sitting waiting idly for her life to happen.”  Graciela was convinced that she had waited on a long line to get born and she wanted nothing more than to take a sip from the juice of life.  She begged to be taken away, anywhere that was not the mundane place she called home. It was when her new husband Casimiro took her “away” that she learned one of the lessons she would cherish for the rest of her life: the smartest you do in life is play dumb…let nothing even draw your blood.  Graciela took those words and the thimble and waited for the moment she could find her own way in life.

Graciela’s feet began to itch again…It was during solitary walks that her courage would bubble up.  Being a mother meant having a child control her and Graciela could not accept that. Thus Graciela cut all emotional ties to her daughter,

At three years old, Mercedita could already recognize the faraway stare that stole Graciela’s gaze from hers.  When Graciela sat at the table to eat, Mercedita crawled under her skirt and stayed there until Graciela nudged her away with a foot. Go away, little runt, and let me live!  (58)

Being a mother, wife, and the best washerwoman in town was not enough for Graciela she wanted to know that life had something in store for her.  She did not want to live in the same town with the same people, she did not want to witness women and children being beaten in their homes, she did not want to be subservient to a man who could not provide her with all the things she wanted.  Graciela’s need to flea consumed her…so much so that she had to rub camphor into the reddened soles of her feet. However, it was to no avail, Graciela took wind one day and tried not to look back.
   
It is through personal experiences, the weight of responsibility and all the lessons learned that a woman creates her own identity. On her trip Graciela began to build her knowledge.  Though never mature enough to handle the handling of a home, Graciela came to realize that her restlessness was to be tamed but her need for freedom was quenchless.  Her mother’s words echoed, “Go after men, if you think that’s freedom. End up worse than where you started.”  That was the first lesson she had not heeded and it would haunt her, “how ridiculous to have expected Silvio, Casimiro, or even the fool beside her to hand her a world that was not theirs to give.” (81) Graciela’s free-spirit, her naïve heart, and her earthly desires would lead to disaster, not only for herself but for her entire town.  Her escapades while away from home culminated in a disease that would wipe out most of her town.  The syphilis spreads to all those that were impious, the extension of the disease proved that within the walls of a seemingly virtuous community there lies much desire and despair.  Graciela was not the only woman suffocated by the modest life and unreachable dreams, every woman was afflicted by the hardships of life.   However, Graciela was the only one willing to risk everything for a taste of freedom.

Mercedes

   
Mercedes, angry at the life her mother had given her and at the love withheld, lived a conservative and giving life.  When Graciela left Mercedes cared for her ailing stepfather until his demise. She looked to the Lord for solace and the strength to continue living,

Each Sunday, Mercedes held her shaking hands together, howled on the steps of the Alter. Sundays stilled the fear that had lodged inside her, deadly as a razor blade.  Prayer eased rage. With prayers louder than the mumbling around her, Mercedes could fade Graciela’s face from her mind. […]  She had convinced the congregation that an unfortunate girls like herself, abandoned by her evil mother and orphaned by her benevolent step father, had every right to be greedy with the Holy Spirit. (160-1)

Unlike her mother Graciela, Mercedes was able to sacrifice her self in the name of religion and what was right.  Whereas Graciela would not sacrifice whom she was in order to live a proper life, Mercedes,

Suppressed her natural urges, like bathing in the rain, in a thunderstorm, where she was born.  Kept her hair from flying loose about her face the way she wanted.  Tried not to let the new attention from men put a tremble on her lips.  But those simple desires required hard bargaining with Him. (164)

After feeling so unwanted by her mother, Mercedes did her best to find her own worth: an ability with numbers and the reputation of a God-Fearing, hardworking girls were strongholds she herself had erected. (164) Mercedes was a different mind set than Graciela. Unlike Graciela in her heyday, Mercedes realized she herself preferred private, internal journeys to external ones. (203) Although the product of a new generation of girls, she learned from her mother’s harsh experiences and lived her life the “right way,” marrying, having, children and being faithful to the ideals of womanhood she held. Yet although Mercedes fought hard to erase Graciela from her life, Mercedes had seen in her daughter Amalfi, “the same absentmindedness that made Mercedes distrust Graciela; it was the quickness with which Amalfi agreed to part with [her daughter] Leila.” (204)

Leila

               
Raised in the United States by her Grandmother Mercedes, Leila came to know the journeys of her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.  She was heeded daily, told to follow righteous paths and was expected to be a new woman while retaining the culture and lessons of her ancestors.  When told to remember the stories told to her Leila would adamantly state, “Nah, ‘Buela, I live for the now. Everyone is either telling me to remember stuff I never lived, or to prepare for some who-knows future.” (213) To Leila, those who carried the past carried the dead and those who chased the future died of cardiac arrest. (213) Leila’s life of free-willed sexuality, love of book and medicine, and constant need to test the boundaries of life made Mercedes realize that Leila had the soul of Graciela.  Leila’s family knew that, “kids in New York grow up wild,” and so they did everything they possibly could to tame her.  Trips to the Dominican Republic, punishments, rewards, nothing would satisfy her thirst for life.  Mercedes could not fathom the thought of Leila coming of age in New York,

The deterioration of Dominicans living abroad, especially the youth, who were living out of wedlock and dressing like common hookers-including the boys. And they’ve forgotten Spanish and stopped combing their hair and become Negros who bop their heads to that awful awful music.

Leila, like Graciela, escaped from her home, broke the “rules” of morality and her grandparents, and learned the hard way how much suffering life can bring.  In one week Leila learned all the things that Graciela had learned in a lifetime.  Sh e was able to accept life as it was and lead a calm balance between freedom and sacrifice.  Leila felt Graciela’s presence and learned to channel the guidance,

Waited on a long line to get born. Still, life dealt me a shit deal. Don’t listen to whoever invents magic about me. Always tried to live what I wanted. Never pretended to be a good woman. Never tried to be a bad one. Just lived what I wanted. That’s’s all my mystery. Forget dirty tongues. They’re next door, in the soup, even in your head. Some weak souls always trying to slip their tongue inside your mouth, clean as a baby’s pit. You, listen. My life was more salt than goat. Lived between memory and wishes…but, how much can a foot do inside a tight shoe? Make something better of it than me. (248)

 

Women in Reality

Though Song of the Water Saints, depicts a tumultuous fictional tale of three women finding themselves within the roles given to them, reality is not so far away.  Many of the women in the Dominican Republic underwent the same life experiences and  faced similar problems that the women in Song of the Water Saints had.   Like in most post-colonial Caribbean Countries, all social classes very family oriented and the women’s place was in the home catering the needs of the family.  My interviewee, Maria Valdez, a Dominican working class housewife, mother of four who was born and raised on the island in the 1950's, agreed that growing up in a Dominican household was indeed a difficult task, “...in my house all the girls could not go outside.  Everything was very, very, very strict and the girls had to go to school and then they had to come straight home.”  She went on to say that household chores and taking care of siblings took up most of their time, “in the Hispanic culture and especially in the Dominican culture the house was women centered, men would come in and out of the relationship and it was mainly woman centered so in a way have had a big role in the development of the family.”  However, we must remember that it may be difficult and stressful for some women to handle all the responsibilities of running a household.  Gala Valeta, one of the interviewees in Donatella Lorch’s article, “Is America Any Place for a Nice Hispanic Girl?” said, “I grew up in a culture where women are superwomen.  You do it all and you don’t complain,” (C1).  The young women of those days were overloaded with responsibilities and made to learn the hard lessons of life at a young age.  Maria spoke of what types of things she and her sisters had to do for her large family of twenty,

Bueno mi ninez fue muy triste, mi mama tuvo dieziocho hijos, y vivimos una vida muy pobrecita, de pobreza y de verdad que fue muy triste la vida de nosotros...bueno en el tiepmo de mi ninez le dire que tuvimos que trabajar muy duro; En el tiempo que mi mama tuvo estos dieziocho hijos, mi mama tuvo un hijo todos los anos, vez tras vez cada ano (de nueve a diez meses) ya tenia un baby.  Entonces me arecuerdo, que nosotras, las que estavanos mas grandes tenianos que atender a nuestros hermanitos.  Mi papa trabajaba de abanil y el tenia que trabjar duro mientras que mi mama era ama de casa.  Las reglas de mi casa eran que todos los hijos tenian que trabajar desde pequenitos. Ya a los ocho anos yo sabia lavar, yo sabia planchar, yo sabia coser la ropa, yo sabia todas las tareas de la casa.  En una parte pues eso me beneficio mucho.

Yet, there is more to becoming a woman than cleaning and caring for the household. Sexuality and all the issues that come along when coming into womanhood were rarely addressed.  These young women had to be pure and tasteful, any talk of sex, menstruation, or relationships between men and women was strictly forbidden.  Judith Ortiz Cofer agrees, stating that, “As a girl I was kept under strict surveillance by my parents since my virtue and modesty were, by their cultural equation, the same as their honor,” (221).  The notion that these girls were to be pure and modest was instilled in them from day one.  The way to keep them chaste, (in their mothers opinions), was to keep them in the dark, in regards to female issues, sexuality, their coming of age, and their roles as women in society.  When I asked Maria whether or not she thought that mothers educating their young daughters today is important, she said it was.  She said that she had, “lived ignorantly,” and that she never treated her daughters the same way.  Her mother never spoke to her or her sisters about coming into womanhood, their schoolwork, or what goals they were expected to achieve throughout their lives,

You know the first time I had my period I had no idea what it was.  I asked my mother and she told me with an attitude, “do this and this and here is a sanitary towel,” and she never said anything else to me about it.  Really, they didn’t tell us what they wanted they sent us to school and we went to church on Sundays.  My mom was very religious and devote, but she never expressed to us that she wanted us to study or anything like that, any academic goals she had for us she never to

Since the woman of the 1950's was not allowed to exhibit any type of sexuality and because she was so suffocated with the rules and Dominican girls soon left their homes at a very young age and made a life of their own without the guidance or advice of their parents.  Maria Valdez, who was born and raised n a strict Dominican household with eight sisters and nine brothers, says that when the girls of the household became old enough, they left the house,

In that time when I lived with my mom and dad I just wanted to leave at the age of 14 and 15, I just wanted to get out.  My sister’s felt the same because, it was always restrictions, always rules and for anything we’d get beaten and so all of us at the age of like 15 or 16 with our boyfriends.  It was the life of a slave a life that was suffocating so we left, there was noting else to do!

The conflict that these women had with their mother’s strictness on the island because of conflicting views can still be seen today.  Dr. Carmen Inoa Vasquez, the author of, The Maria Paradox: How Latinas Can Merge Old World Traditions with New World Self Esteem, describes the, “mind-set of the traditional Latin womanhood as “marianismo,” focusing on the Virgin Mary as an ideal of duty self-sacrifice, passivity and chastity,” (33).  The generation of women that left home because of the strict structure of their Dominican homeland are now the mothers and grandmothers of the new liberated Dominican generation. These young women have a life in a new culture that expects them to be educated workers that contribute to their homes and the economy in more ways that just being a housewife and mother.  There is a chance that this new generation is privileged in ways that other generations were not simply because as Maria puts it, “I never wanted to be the same way [my parents were] I didn’t want to give my daughters the same life I was given.” 
However, these women did not escape their homes and forget all of their notions of womanhood and morality that they were taught.  In fact most of their beliefs came with them and were taught to the next generation of girls. The Dominican women that came to America did not want to forget their culture and wanted to share the customs of the island with their children.  Ortiz-Cofer says that,

It is custom, however, not chromosomes, that leads us to choose scarlet over pale pink.  As young girls, it was our mothers who influences our decision about clothes and colors-mothers who had grown up on a tropical island where the natural environment was a riot of primary colors, where showing your skin was one way to keep cool as well as to look sexy. (223)

If the past influences the present, what is happening now that girls are high on liberty, what has changed?   The Dominican women of the past were constricted by the stifling rules and reserve of the Dominican household, left their homes, and without knowledge of their own bodies, emotions, or needs as a woman, settled for their teen boyfriends and had children at a young age young mothers and unknowing of themselves as women.  Seeing things in this light makes us question, does the journey of each woman help construct the next generation, or does each generation create it’s own path?
    The new generations of women that are raised in the United States have to face the difficulty of assimilating to a new society.  According to Dr. Vasquez, the Dominican woman “tries to continue being what she was back home at the same time as what she has become here.  There are a lot of pressures,” (49).  When these Latinas came to the U.S. in the 1950's, 1960's, and the1970's, they became eroticized, even though they tried to distance themselves from the “hot blooded Latina” image as Judith Ortiz Cofer states in her essay, The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria.  When Dominican women came to the US with their newly found freedom, their bright and tight clothes, and their “sexual appealing” customs (traditional dances: Salsa, Merengue, & Boleros), they were immediately categorized as provocative and were thought to possess some type of exuberant “sexual power.”  These things that were the norm on a tropical island became something much more in the U.S. and the “cultural schizophrenia” that emerged as a result of the differences still present. The new generations of Dominican women have seen first hand what battles they must fight against sexism, racism and discrimination.
    The new generations of Latinas, like myself, have a responsibility.  Although many of they young woman have not had the restrictive or family centered homes that the previous generation had, some of the young women grow up to know more about their sexuality and their freedom and get to better themselves.  Now the Latina woman has a different role, a different journey than her predecessors.  She goes to school, works, attends college, and has a family.  There is a wave of change and there is a gathering in the middle in regards to the life, liberty and future of Dominican women.

Women in Thought
   
Though literature sometimes paints an unrealistic view of women it is exciting to know that more women are coming forward and rendering their own stories, having their own voices heard.  It is these voices that contribute to the improvement of society and the empowerment of women everywhere.  It is the life of Caribbean women that consumes my imagination.  It is the food, music, rhythm, sensuality, humor, and cadences-that remain ever so powerful.  (Out of the Kumbla) 
   
The condition of the Latina woman is constantly changing and for Dominican women this change is even more rapid.  Dominicans are the largest number of people immigrating to the United States.  Dominican women are over 80% of that mass movement.  These women not only bring their aspirations but they also bring their strength of character, motivation, and absolute force to continually build their futures.  Women are the essential carriers of culture and their knowledge represents the past, present, and future.  It is a sad fact that Heroic women are underrepresented and often unjustly categorized as brazen or careless. In Woman as a Nation, by Carol Boyce Davies we see that women’s journey’s are “placed” by society as a subdivision left to be ignored. 

So while on one hand there is an identification of structured female, political sphere, coupled with the derogatory completing words, the subordination of this “nation” of women becomes clear.   Putting a woman in her place seems to dominate the entire Caribbean culture.

As a result of these travesties against women we are required, as women, to tell our stories, document our journeys, and create a new truth regarding the strength of women.  We are to no longer be innocent, in need of protection, or fall subject to the values set upon us by others, instead, we are to rise above, become “spiritually resourceful” and become master’s of our own destinies. 


Works Cited


Carole Boyce Davies & Elaine Savory Fido
Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women in Literature
Africa World Press, Inc. 1990

Cristina Santos, Clarice Lispector &Carmen Boullosa
Bending the Rules in the Quest for an Authentic Female Identity
Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. 2004

Beth Miller
Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols
University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd. London England 1983

Nelly Rosario
Song of the Water Saints
Pantheon Books, New York 2002

Dr.  Carmen Inoa Vasquez,
 The Maria Paradox: How Latinas Can Merge Old World Traditions With New World Self-Esteem
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996

Donatella Lorch
 Is America any Place for a Nice Hispanic Girl?
 Essays and Short Stories published online and anthologies of feminism.
New York Times C1 April 11, 1996

Judith Ortiz-Cofer,  
The Myth of the Latin Woman: I just Met a Girl Named María
Short Story and Essay Anthology

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