Analysis Of Julia Alvarez's Essay I Want To Be Miss America

Julia Alvarez, in her essay I Want to Be Miss America, expresses her concerns regarding cultural appropriation in America during the nineteen fifties. Her main points consist of her reliving the most powerful events that she remembers as a child in New York. Alvarez then goes on to describe the Miss America contest in which hardly any contestants were a minority. Alvarez uses artistic and inartistic claims to support her argument throughout the essay, but mainly utilizes her artistic proofs. Her artistic claims consist of her reminiscing on her old life with her family and stories from her childhood. Overall, Alvarez clearly communicated her points to the audience through artistic and inartistic claims throughout her essay I Want to Be Miss America. Alvarez’s main claim is that the incompatibility and detachment from America’s culture is owed to the unrealistic beauty standards that society rewards. She starts her inartistic claim with “if there was a ‘Hispanic,’ she usually looked all-American” and that there were usually “one, or possibly two, light-skinned black girls”. This is used as evidence that America favors slim, Caucasian females for their definition of beauty. She goes on to say that her “looks didn’t fit in” with America’s beauty standards. …show more content…
For instance, she very clearly thinks that American beauty standards are too narrow. She emphasizes this idea by pointing out that she and her sisters “painstakingly rolled [their] long, curly hair… like our classmates” and “needed a strong foundation to tone down that olive.”. This social pressure even made Alvarez and her sisters clearly disobey their mother by buying Nair and applying it to their young skin. This act of rebellion was committed because the children dreamed of having “long, silky limbs” like the models on