Aurora Levins Morales

Aurora Levins Morales also uses a distinct rhetorical strategy. She has thirteen short numbered sections, transitioning abruptly, creating a sense of urgency simply with the breakages and the brevity. Sentence fragments punctuate her paragraphs.

She writes about the body and sex and how the culture she was raised in vilifies the act at the same time as it is put forth as woman's only currency.

Women teaching women our bodies are disgusting and dirty, our desires are obscene, men are all sick and want only one sickening thing from  us. Saying, you've got to learn how to hold out on 'em just enough to get what you want. It's the only item you can put on the market, so you better make it go far, and when you have to deliver, lie down and grit your teeth and bear it, because there's no escape. (53) 

She finds sex as an economics of womanhood. Unlike Perkins Gilman's economic evaluation of women, Levins Morales includes the idea of selling sex, not only in a traditional prostitution model, but also as relationship currency.

In section 5 she brings up the duplicity of the women in her culture. How it is not the men that cause her the most issues, as the Anglo women assume, but rather the women. Women she can't trust, because they sustain the status quo, the communal standards.

"I can pass for anyone" (54) and (55). Those words resonate with me. Just as Levins Morales can pass, so can I. She grew up steeped in more Latin culture than I did, but it is no less in my flesh and blood than in hers. "Writing this I am browner that I have ever been. Spanish ripples on my tongue and I want the accent" (55). If I could only speak, then I could find out if the accent lives somewhere on my tongue.