Heroes and Saints Analysis PDF

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An analysis of the play "Heroes and Saints " by Cherrie Moraga....

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name Christina Dennehey TH 451 28 September 2019

Heroes and Saints Analysis The problem that the playwright is trying to solve with this play is the dehumanization of Hispanic workers. The playwright proposes to solve this issue by bridging the divide between Hispanic and white people and forcing us to look at the ways Hispanics are silenced by those in power. Heroes and Saints calls for the audience to listen to and empathize with its characters, as well as consider the reasons why we say we care about hispanic people. In Scene One, Ana Perez, a news reporter, concludes an interview with Amparo, a woman who works in the fields. Amparo has just spoken about the pesticides which are causing birth defects and causing cancer in children. That concludes our Hispanic hour for the week, but watch for next week’s show, where we will take a five-hour drive north to the heart of San Francisco’s Latino Mission District, for an insider’s observation of the Day of the Dead, the Mexican Halloween. Cut! We’ll edit her out later. (94) This quote illustrates how people in power tend to edit their views of people of color to make them seem more pleasing and erase the issues that they deal with. Ana Perez claims to be listening to Hispanic workers, but she only wants to portray the fun, colorful side of the Hispanic experience rather than talk about the problems they are facing as well. Also, note how she also describes Day of the Dead as “the Mexican Halloween”. This comes off as whitewashing the holiday, painting it as just a Mexican version of a white American holiday, when it really has nothing to do with Halloween at all. Here, the playwright calls us to

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consider how we might try to ignore the problems that Hispanic people face by whitewashing their identity. Finally, this play asks the audience to consider why we choose to listen to the voices of Hispanic people. Even after staging numerous protests throughout the play, going so far as to crucify the children killed by pesticides, the workers realize by the end of the play that no one will bother to listen until it becomes their problem too. They realize that the only way they will be listened to is if the fields are burned to ashes. It had to be something that directly affected the owners’ profits, i.e. destroying their crops. This calls us to think about why we should care about Hispanic issues— do we care about them when they suffer, or do we only care when we suffer? Overall, Heroes and Saints addresses the problems that Hispanics face and calls its audience to think about several issues. We are asked to think about how people in power dehumanize Hispanic people, whitewash their experience to ignore their problems, and only care about their issues when they directly affect us. It is a play that shows these issues in broad daylight and forces us to look at these problems that we might otherwise ignore....