“The Question”
Chicana Role Model Rule Number 8 has to do with “The Question” that every white person eventually asks every Latino: “where are you from?” Inherent in the question is the assumption that anyone non-white must be an immigrant who came to America from somewhere else. Also inherent in the question is the failure to understand that any person of color could ask any white person the same question with equal validity since they, too, are the children of immigration. The Question is a symbol representing the softer, implicit kind of racism lacking the viciousness of open bigotry.
“The Price is Right”
“The Day My Sister was on Television” recounts from the experiential perspective of family and neighbors watching it in the living room the day that the narrator’s sister was asked to “come on down” and be a contestant on The Price is Right game show. She gets three chances to make the correct bid that will elevate her onto the stage with Bob Barker and the three items that come up for bid are a deluxe washing machine, a microwave oven and scuba gear. That the sister places the same losing of $1000 on each of these items with widely disparate retail prices symbolizes the way that economic disparity is so pervasive yet so underestimated by most people in America.
"Indian Nose"
As in Native American, not the Asian subcontinent. The narrator of How to be a Chicana Role Model is obsessed with the physique of her nose which is too broad and therefore makes her look like an Indian. And she so continually pinches it, squeezing it together in the vain hope of violating the laws of anatomical structure in order to try to get her nose to conform to the American ideal of beauty. The Indian Nose becomes symbolic of this pressure of assimilation.
Frozen Vegetables
“Attention Shoppers” includes an arresting revelation of the subtle ways in which cultural discrimination exists when the narrator goes grocery shopping with her activist friend who points out—to the narrator’s constant rejection—how even the packaging of frozen food sustains prejudicial expectations. Malibu Style Vegetables prominently features a white cauliflower as the star of its packaging imagery of great big cuts of vegetables while Latino Style Vegetables features tiny little cuts of food messily assorted to project an overcrowded image of “little food for little people.”
“The Gift”
The final story in the Chicana Falsa collection is about a really big and lavishly expensive desk the narrator’s mother buys her, much to the consternation of the rest of the family. The investment symbolizes the faith in her daughter’s writing abilities and the promise that such abilities will pay off on the one hand, but also comes to symbolize the failure to live up to that promise in the eyes of the narrator. When it is time to leave home, the desk remains behind, a lingering dust-collecting presence of that failure to fulfill a parent’s faith until the sudden and shocking death of her mother. Alone in the house with the desk and the memories of everything that others had to sacrifice in order for the desk to be there, it finally attains its last symbolic status: the embodiment of guilt and shame that is sometimes necessary to for people to get done what others have expected them to do.
