Britton's 'Love Is Spelled With A G'

This essay will analyze the role that Latin American women play in the intersection of class, race and gender particularly focusing on two short stories from Panama and Puerto Rico. The former, Rosa María Britton’s “Love is Spelled with a G” tells the story of a young Panamanian Mulatto city girl who aspires to escape her near-hopelessness of her racial and social situation by marrying a white US soldier. Britton is one of the most read Panamanian writers and one of the reasons for her success is her conventional style which manages to demonstrate topics about the daily challenges of third-world countries in Latin America, with a strong dose of humor and irony. While her story highlights the optimism and tenacity of Latin American women, it also portrays the ugly reality of the colonial mindset on the culture and how it promotes discrimination within an already oppressed community. …show more content…
Isabel Luberza is Ambrosio’s wife while Isabel La Negra is his mistress. Each woman is left with half of Ambrosio’s inheritance upon his death, including the main house where he stayed with his wife. Whereas Luberza had been Ambrosio’s saintly white wife, La Negra, who is Black, was his prostitute. Ferré’s story is presented as an on-going memory of the two women’s encounters with and their recollections of Ambrosio. However, “it quickly spirals into a singular memory and a singular woman, a blend of the two,” 3 and the story climaxes with an encounter between Isabel Luberza and Isabel La Negra. While Ferré employs the use of characters as metaphors to symbolize Puerto Rican culture, Britton uses her protagonist to show the emotional challenges of a Latin American woman struggling with her