Summary Of Legal Alien By Pat Mora

In “Legal Alien”, Pat Mora discusses further the borders that are allowed, making people from a Mexican-American background partially accepted and partially shut out. Instead of placing two people in contrast and similarity, Mora places the speaker as a partially undefined person against the two majority cultures s/he faces. We do not know if the speaker is a man or a woman, young or old. We do know that s/he can speak English and Spanish, and feels caught in between two cultures by the perceptions of others. The primary focus of the language of the poem is in the hyphenation of the speaker. Almost as a definition, each hyphen separates and explains the stereotypes. “Bi-lingual, Bi-cultural” visually provides the separation that would not normally