Machismo Cultural Beliefs

1080 Words5 Pages
Cultural beliefs are exclusive to sections and populaces in the world. Latin America is a place where cultural beliefs and traditions abound and there are numerous rituals from the catholic religion and specific roles of the family members in a household. Chronicle of a Death Foretold revolves around the events surrounding the murder of Santiago Nasar, a young man who is believed to have taken the virginity of Angela Vicario without consent. On her wedding night, after realising that she was not a virgin, Angela's husband, Bayardo San Roman, returns her to her house to guard his honour. Angela's twin brothers Pedro Vicario and Pablo Vicario, furious at this affront to their family’s honour question her as to who took her virginity, and she…show more content…
It fell to them, as the men of the family, to restore their family’s honour by killing him. This was their duty and so even though they didn’t want to kill Nasar they were obligated to. The plot of the book is affected by the machismo cultural belief because characters in the book embody the culture and so their actions are decided by machismo. The whole death of Nasar happened because of the twins machismo need to kill him. The cultural beliefs of machismo and honour are very closely related and defines the plot of the…show more content…
Both of these types of honour are very similar to the honour defined in the previous paragraph. Honor killing is based on the second type of honor and is committed when a person’s honra is compromised. Honor killing is a practice of deliberate murder as a means for families to their level of honor as a result of a certain incidents which that society view as shameful. Examples of such incidents triggering honor killing are rape, sexual immorality, divorce, mutiny. The offended party’s male representatives either kill the one who brought shame upon the family or the one who committed the act to shame the one who shamed the family. For a rape example, the offended family can either kill the girl who was raped or the rapist. Honor killing typically was said to be exacted out by the male gender. Normally it was females who were victims of this practice. Certain cases did not consider the views of the victims. An example from the text can be Santiago. He wasn’t questioned to find out whether he was the perpetrator and also judging from the way Marquez portrays Santiago as being ignorant to the news that he was going to die, the reader is left to think whether it was fair for him to have died or

More about Machismo Cultural Beliefs

Open Document