Danny Santiago's Famous All Over Town
When I was little I remember driving across country, going to Florida, and past neighborhoods that were anything but mine. They had old houses that looked like they were going to fall down any minute, real trashy looking. In Colorado, my house was nice and always kept up. I sat in the car wondering what kind of people lived in those run down places and what they were like. The answers came to me years later when I read the book, Famous All Over Town, by Danny Santiago. The main character, Chato, is a young Hispanic boy living in a neighborhood like the ones I saw when I was little. After reading the book, although I never thought I would have anything in common with people who lived like that, I learned that Chato and I have do have similarities, but we have more differences.
There aren't very many similarities between Chato and I, but there is one, and it's a big one. We both have families that love us. Lena, Chato's sister takes care of him after he gets home from the hospital. Then he begins to think about his family and how glad he is to be home. "Lena loved me, my mom loved me, and my father loved me, it seemed" (45). All of Chato's family loves him and he loves being with them. In my house, you would find the same kind of environment and I can relate to some of Chato's family life. However, Chato's family is not always nice to him. His family has many problems, such as everyone keeping secrets from each other and everyone lieing to each other. For example, Chato's father is having an affair and everyone knows about it, but they all keep it from Chato. When he finds out he is very mad at himself and things he is dumb for not knowing, while everyone else does. "She knew, they knew, the whole damn town knew, except only dumb, stupid me" (l46). In my family, however, everyone is honest and you would never see anyone keeping something that important from the others. Another example of how Chato's family is different, is shown when Chato is having a bellyache and his father things that he is faking it. He tells him, "Shut-up, crybaby-coward" (26). His father is not being very nice to him because he is sick.
Harding, D. J. (2010). Living the Drame: Community, Conflict, and Culture Among Inner-City Boys. Chicago, IL: The University Of Chicago Press.
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Chavez Ravine was a self-sufficient and tight-knit community, a rare example of small town life within a large urban metropolis, but no matter how much the inhabitants loved thei...
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relaxing activity such as a walk or while taking a shower, our minds envoce our
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Creativity should be about the pure enjoyment of having been involved, influencing others and being influenced, combining ideas and preserving those that speak to us, discovering and appreciating all that which is greater than ourselves.
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Junot Diaz is a Dominican-American writer whose collection of short stories Drown tells the story of immigrant families in the urban community of New Jersey. His short story “Fiesta, 1980” focuses on Yunior, an adolescent boy from Dominican Republic and his relationship with his father. On the other hand, Piri Thomas was a great Latino writer from Puerto-Rico whose memoir Down These Mean Streets tells his life story as an adolescent residing in Harlem and the challenges he faces outside in the neighborhood and at home with his father. Both Diaz and Thomas in different ways explore the dynamics of father-son relationships in their work. Furthermore, both expose masculinity as a social construct.
The hood, short for neighborhood, of a predominantly poor, minority area is vastly different from the neighborhood of middle or upper class suburban area. Whereas one is overridden by violence, hopelessness, and a sense of confinement, the other is an exemplification of the American dream, prosperity, and opportunity. The polar differences between the two areas are not coincidental, but, rather, consequential.
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“Home is where the heart is.” In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros develops this famous statement to depict what a “home” really represents. What is a home? Is it a house with four walls and a roof, the neighborhood of kids while growing up, or a unique Cleaver household where everything is perfect and no problems arise? According to Cisneros, we all have our own home with which we identify; however, we cannot always go back to the environment we once considered our dwelling place. The home, which is characterized by who we are, and determined by how we view ourselves, is what makes every individual unique. A home is a personality, a depiction of who we are inside and how we grow through our life experiences. In her personal, Cisneros depicts Esperanza Cordero’s coming-of-age through a series of vignettes about her family, neighborhood, and personalized dreams. Although the novel does not follow a traditional chronological pattern, a story emerges, nevertheless, of Esperanza’s search to discover the meaning of her life and her personal identity. The novel begins when the Cordero family moves into a new house, the first they have ever owned, on Mango Street in the Latino section of Chicago. Esperanza is disappointed by the “small and red” house “with tight steps in front and bricks crumbling in places” (5). It is not at all the dream-house her parents had always talked about, nor is it the house on a hill that Esperanza vows to one day own for herself. Despite its location in a rough neighborhood and difficult lifestyle, Mango Street is the place with which she identifies at this time in her life.