The issues of stereotypes and fighting them have always been dramatically important for many people living in the hostile or simply uncommon surroundings. The reaction on something different from the accustomed state of things may vary from simple rejection (as in case with Judith Ortiz Cofer’s way of dressing being misunderstood at school both by peers and teachers, or the fear of people walking streets at night seeing Brent Staples) to open mocking (as in case with an indecent song sung at the face of Cofer at the official meeting) or even danger (the concern of Staples about the fact that “where fear and weapons meet–and they often do in urban America–there is always the possibility of death”) (Staples 450).
Both authors are concerned with the issues of stereotypes negatively affecting their lives. However, Cofer admits that the effect is ambiguous, sometimes being positive and sometimes negative – she worries about the stereotype of low morality of Latino women, recollecting her first experience of being dressed brighter than everyone else at school:
The way our teachers and classmates looked at us that day in school was just a taste of the culture clash that awaited us in the real world, where prospective employers and men on the street would often misinterpret our tight skirts and jingling bracelets as a come-on… In their special vocabulary, advertisers have designated “sizzling” and “smoldering” as the adjectives of choice for describing not only the foods but also the women of Latin America (Cofer 443-444).
Staples is also distinguished from other residents of the place where he lives, but his concerns are different in their essence – he experienced utter shock when he understood a woman walking in the street got afraid of him and applied a stereotype of a robber or a rapist to him just because of his being black:
It was in the echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into–the ability to alter public space in ugly ways. It was clear that she thought herself the quarry of a mugger, a rapist, or worse… I was surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once (Staples 450-451).
They both have to put up with the present state of affairs as they are not empowered to change the stereotypes, each of them doing it his/her own way. For example, Staples has got used to hide his feelings:
Over the years, I learned to smother the rage I felt at so often being taken for a criminal. Not to do so would surely have led to madness (Staples 453).
The attitude of Cofer is more positive because she has found the way to make her appearance more of an advantage than a drawback, thus taking a beneficial position and attracting more attention to the specificity of her culture by being special:
I travel a lot around the United States, reading from my books of poetry and my novel, and the reception I most often receive is one of positive interest by people who want to know more about my culture. There are, however, thousands of Latinas without the privilege of an education or the entree into society that I have (Cofer 446).
Summing everything that has been said up, it is necessary to admit that both authors analyze their personal experience of minorities suffering from the stereotypical attitude to them. However, Cofer makes the emphasis on dreadful exclusions of the usual attractiveness of her unusual appearance, whereas Staples realizes that he is doomed to be afraid of for his whole life being physically similar to the widely spread profile of a street criminal. They both have adopted their own attitude to the stereotypes they are subject to, but they do this in a different way – Cofer fighting for the recognition of her dignity, and Staples – for survival.