Julia Alvarez “arrived in the United States at a time in history that was not very welcoming to people who were different.” Alvarez was stereotyped and hurt because of her ethnic background. Her tone emphasized the depressing nature of the situation and the disappointment of losing everything and the treatment receive in the USA. Her tone of depression and disappointment emphasizes the pain she experienced because of the judgment in America. As her essay comes to a close her tone shifts to hopeful and relaxed. Alvarez is accepted into America “through the wide doors of its literature.” Her introduction to literature allowed her to begin to feel accepted into society. Since Alvarez is accepted into society because of her assimilation through literature she becomes hopeful for her new prospect and relaxed to finally be understood. Overall, the tone shift from depressed and disappointed to hopeful and relaxed is significant because it emphasizes the central idea of mistreatment occurring within a new society and leads to acceptance with assimilation.…
In How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, Julia Alvarez discusses the four girls’transition from the Dominican Republic to America. The Garcia’s are an immigrant family who must find a balance between their identity as Dominicans and their new identities as Americans. Yolanda, the sister on whom the story primarily focuses, must find a balance between the strict and old fashioned culture she comes from and the new, innovative and radical culture she is now learning to embrace. Immigration challenges Yolanda and her sisters to create a bi-cultural identity—a task at which they ultimately fail. They embark on a search to find themselves, feeling torn between two distinctly different and opposing…
In Julia Alvarez’s short story, ”Nombres”, and in the visual, “Graduation Day”, both depict the common theme that people should embrace their culture and heritage. In “Nombres”, the theme can be seen when Julia's mother states, “You know what (Julia’s) friend Shakespeare said, ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’,” (Alvarez Pg. 1). This shows that Julia’s mother doesn’t want her to be ashamed of where she comes from, and that she should embrace her name. This theme is also evident in the visual,” Graduation Day”. The fact that the loving daughter, who just graduated from school, is hugging her hard-working father, shows that she is grateful for him, and that she is proud of him. Also in “Graduation Day”, the daughters decorated graduation…
Whether it is fear of deportation or of speaking up, undocumented individuals are always dominated and limited to what they can say or do. Therefore, “Transborder Lives” experiences can be evaluated through the lenses of internal colonialism. With the recurring cycle of the oppressed and the oppressor, the concept of internal colonialism becomes present. The dominant society has and still creates political and economic inequalities to exploit minority groups. Stephen provides the Bracero Program as an example, which was designed to recruit Mexican laborer to substitute for those who left the farm labor industry to serve in the U.S. armed forces. The program played an important role in the arrival of the Mixtecs and Zapotecs in California and Oregon, since their migration decision was a result of labor recruitment. Just like all those indigenous people were recruited, my grandfather, Jose Regalado Yepez also formed part of the Bracero program. He was recruited at a young age, but the desire for a better life and the need to go back and be an impact for those he left behind was what guided him. However, accompanying the Bracero Program was also Operation Wetback, a program that focused on deporting and preventing undocumented people from entering the U.S. Similarly, the poem I am Joaquin by Rodolfo Gonzales captures the unity and pride of Indo-Mexican culture, along with the struggles against racial prejudice and social injustice they experienced. The poem states “Lost in a world of confusion, caught up in the whirl of a gringo society, confused by the rules, scorned by attitudes, suppressed by manipulation, and destroyed by modern society”. With their policies once again we can see the U.S. dominance and the lack of consistency, where the U.S. approves immigrants for cheap labor, but discards them when they are no longer…
The piece by Castillo is a personal reflection that offers a peculiar and particular point of view from one person, and that represents how people permeates their surrounding reality, in this case the Mexican Revolution. These kinds of sources are extremely valuable in order to listen to the average voices. Especially in the case of underprivileged groups, such as indigenous populations and women, sometimes this is the only opportunity to grasp intimate daily moments, practices, and customs.…
Latinos are constituted as the largest minority group in the United States due to high immigration and birth rates. Roberto Suro’s book discusses the changing social and economic policies in this country in accordance to the emergence of the Latino population. Latinos in the US, especially the younger generations and the children of immigrants, are closely tied to teenage pregnancies, gangs, and drug dealing. It is very clear that the Latino migrant experience is very different according to each respective community. As we see, the Cuban community in Miami is in some ways an exception to the stereotypes associated with Latinos that go hand in hand with the downward social and economic mobility of this population. The Guatemalan migrant experience in Suro’s book is closely linked to this idea of Latinos creating transnational networks, as there was a huge influx of Guatemalans into the Huston area. Suro outlines possible forms of stopping the flow of illegal immigration into the US. On of the main arguments in this research is the idea of short-term gains vs. long terms costs which is what Suro says is what Latino bring to the United States. His views on potential tactics that could be taken by the United States government to punish illegal immigration would somewhat be too costly but in the long run this country…
First, Chronicles of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia- Marquez precedes the reader to originate interest by writing a fiction novel in non-chronological order. The author Gabriel Garcia-Marquez originates the theory “Make them wait” giving information in multiple tenses. The majority of the novel is written in past, present, and future tense to originate a suspenseful form of fictional writing. The fiction theory is presented throughout the entire novel of Chronicles of a Death Foretold.…
The purpose of this book written “From Indians to Chicanos” was to make aware to many of the readers to understand the history and movement of Chicanos. The author James Diego Vigil focuses on being Mexican American in United States outlining by charting the changes in the culture from pre-Colombian to Anglo-American Mexicanization Period using the six “C” chart. While Vigil enriches the events and conditions clearly so that readers can understand the changes and its developments that has historically change Chicano Life. Some of the changes that…
In the book, El Otro Lado by Julia Alvarez, describes the author’s experience of leaving the dominican republic and moving to the united states. This is more than just her moving though, it’s about her transition through things like her culture, her behavior, her personality and her childhood into a world of emotions filled with insecurity, love, hurt. Alvarez’s use of Spanish that is mixed into the English she writes her poems also describe stories of her life along with the struggle of emigrating to a new country and what it’s like living in a country that isn’t 1st world or most advanced, revealing feelings from situations that most immigrants face coming to the United States. Alvarez also reveals her own personal…
El Norte, a 1983 film directed by Gregory Nava, depicts the life of two indigenous teenagers who flee their native country, Guatemala, in search for a better life in America. The reason for fleeing is due to the ethnic and political oppression of the Guatemalan Civil War. The film builds up a strong connection shared between Enrique and Rosa, one of genuine feeling and fierce emotion. This connection is foregrounded by the exaggerated style and is often compared to adulterated relations among Hispanics. Such a differentiation is proposed to underline the strain on the social connection created by the financial aspects of migration. In both Enrique’s and Rosa’s hopes of pursuing the “American Dream”, their fantasies of a better life are both…
In the past few months, Donald Trump seems to have become fonder and fonder of spouting off racist gibberish whenever there is a camera or a reporter nearby to capture it. However, what he never seems to realize is that for every racially biased supporter, there are ten others who are not allowed to tell their own side of the story. The Book of Unknown Americans is a novel which allows these ten others to tell their stories and contradict the preconceived notions that White America has formed about them. Cristina Henriquez uses the characters of Gustavo Milhojas and the Rivera family to discuss the idea of the American Dream - or more specifically, a parent’s American Dream for their child. In the novel, Henriquez uses the characterization of Gustavo Milhojas to help us understand Arturo and Alma’s American Dream; specifically, she argues that although America does its best to close doors to immigrants, they are still able to scrounge up enough opportunities to be…
In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, Gloria Anzaldua shares her feelings of social and cultural difficulties that Mexicans face living in the United States and In “Se Habla Espanol” Tanya Maria Barrientos tells of being Latina who doesn’t speak Spanish.…
This book is capable of influencing individuals to become who they wish to be and not what others expect of them. We all have a collective struggle, when we are reading literature. The author should be commended for his ability to write such a beautiful piece of literature during such hard times. Rudolf Anaya was able to capture the full essence of a moral identity crisis and help the readers better understand their own meaning in life. A weakness in the book is that there is not a glossary to translate the slang Spanish words, and overall Spanish words for the non-Spanish speakers. I believe it is important that readers could refer to the same book to be able to find out what a specific word means. Instead readers are left with the task of going to look for an external source to define specific words. We have “Jesus, María y José” for example, that is a slang expression for a moment of…
In this essay Barrientos argues that the language she speaks defines her identity and who she is as a person. As Barrientos was growing up, she realized being Latin-American was not what she wanted to be, she decided to didn’t want to speak Spanish, as Barrientos says, “To me, speaking Spanish translated into being poor.” She also said “It meant waiting tables and cleaning hotel rooms. It meant being poor.” She thought if she stayed away from Spanish stereotypes they would…
As a son of Mexican American immigrants, Richard Rodriguez recounts the story of his childhood and his struggle to assimilate into American culture. In Aria: A memoir of a Bilingual Childhood, Rodriguez always felt like an outcast whenever he set foot outside of his house. As a young child, he exclusively spoke Spanish to members of his household and tried his best to learn and speak English in the real world. He “regarded Spanish as a private language. It was a ghetto language that deepened and strengthened [his] feeling of public separateness” (Rodriguez 505) because it identified him as a member of his family and it served as a link to his own Mexican heritage. By speaking Spanish, he communicates a certain level of intimacy with all of his relatives. However, as his narrative progresses, he finds himself slowly breaking away from that intimacy as he begins to speak more English, both by force and social pressure. Teachers scolded him if he spoke anything but English and his peers Americanized his name into Richard (rather than calling him Ricardo.) He began to feel like a traitor by mastering this “public language” when his relatives began treating him differently. His bilingual childhood was an enormous adversity that Rodriguez had to overcome.…