Journal Assignment #2- "Only Daughter" Agueda Gomez

     I really enjoyed reading this short essay because the author clearly gets her point across and makes you understand exactly how she felt. In this short essay, Cisneros describes the struggles of being a single daughter in a Mexican-American family. She describes how her large family of nine practices true Mexican values such as: the yelling and loudness of all her family in her house, the “novelas” being watched, the type of food they ate, and the way her family thought about women. The main point of the short story was that the way old-fashioned Mexicans think is unfair to women. The reason to why women are seen as just wives and stay-at-home moms is because men have so much pride and believe that they are the bread makers and the sons are the ones that continue the blood line. Therefore, having a more sons is something to be proud of. 
     Because of the way Cisnero’s family raised her, she often felt rejected and ignored by her father and desired her father’s attention. Cisnero’s decided to continue school and her father approved of this with the purpose that she would find a successful husband in school. However, Cisnero’s felt that she truly had a passion for writing and wrote a book about her culture, the town her family came from, and the house her father grew up on. After two years, her father finally read her book and was extremely proud of her because it was translated in Spanish and the reading related to him. Through literature, Cisnero’s father changed the way he thought about women and saw how his own daughter of seven boys had accomplished so much throught literature. 
     I really liked this short essay because my family is so old fashioned as well and seeing the words like “molcaljete” and “novela” made me smile because they are spanish terms that are usually not seen in literature. Literature that relates to you is fun to read.