Harmony at Home

Synopsis. One of the more interesting essays in Rereading America by Colombo, Cullen, and Lisle was “Looking for Work” by Gary Soto. “Looking for Work” is a narrative of a nine year old Mexican American boy who really desires his family to be the perfect family. His assertion is that he is looking back on his childhood, but tells the story as a child’s point of view. The narrative is placed in the nineteen fifty’s, and focuses on his family experience. The essay indicates the boy lives with his mother, sister, and brother. The boy is the middle child in the family, and he has an older brother and a younger sister. The family always had dinner together, and by doing so it shows strong family background traits portrayed by the author. In this essay that the family always told the boy he is crazy for wanting to dress up for dinner, but the boy would keep insisting on dressing up. He always tried to influence his brother and sister to wear shoes at the dinner table and to dress up. The author indicates that the boy really wants his family to impersonate the Beaver family from the television program “Leave it to Beaver”. Because he wanted so much to be like the Beavers, the boy would walk around his neighborhood with a rake looking for work. Soto put great emphasizes on the middle class neighborhood they lived in, and how it contained people who are mostly in the working class. The mother would always push the children outside to play; therefore, the brother and sister would run off and play with their friends. The boy wants to be wealthy like the Beavers; therefore, he would walk around the neighborhood looking for work and collecting his dimes (Soto 26-31). Synopsis Two. Another selection I enjoyed in Rereading America was “An Indian Story” by Roger Jack. This essay acknowledges the concerns growing up away from one’s father in an Indian culture. Also stating an intimate view of a nonnuclear family, the author points out defined social network. Jack

Cited: Jack, Roger. “An Indian Story.” Rereading America. Eds. Gary Colombo, Robert Cullin, and