The English Lesson

Jimmy Carter once said, “We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.” What he meant by that was America is a very diverse country. Without the difference of its people, America is not America. In the novel, The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henriquez, the story centers around the Rivera family adjusting in the United States. Also, it focuses the life story of the people around them while in the short story, “The English Lesson” by Nicholasa Mohr, it focuses on how immigrants see the United States. Both readings were able to show that many immigrants struggle before and after the come to the United States of America.

Many immigrants
Many people sacrifice a lot of things just to come here because they believed that their life will be better. In Henriquez’s novel, a character named Arturo Rivera moved in the United States with his wife Alma and daughter Maribel. The reason for them moving to the United States is to seek medical attention for their daughter who got in an accident. Arturo and his family didn’t only sacrifices their comfortable life but also, he left his well paying job and work as a minimum wage worker. In the conversation that Alma and Arturo had, it says:
“‘Do they know about your experience? You could be a manager
In the novel, The Book of Unknown Americans it focuses on the Latinos while short story, “The English Lesson” offers a perspective from different ethnic background. Focusing on only one specific group limits the reader's perspective about the life of immigrants in the United States. When the Riveras came to the United States, they moved in a building where all of their neighbors are Latinos. It says, “‘Here is us! Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and Paraguay. We have it all’” (Henriquez, 36). Since the characters in the novel categorized in the same group the struggles that they having are similar from one another. In “The English Lesson,” the readers are able to learn the perspective of the immigrants from the ethnic background. Since the setting of the story is in New York City, one of the diverse city in America, it’s expected that people from different races are represented in the story. It says, “Most of the student were Spanish-speaking. The majority were American citizens- Puerto Ricans who had migrated to new York and spoke very little English. The rest were immigrants admitted to the United States as legal aliens. There were several Chinese, Two Dominicans, one Sicilian and one Pole” (Mohr, 195). Since many of the characters in the short story are not identity in just one group, the