Summary: The Sign In My Father's Hands By Martin Espada

Julia Malki
Mr. Macdonald
English 3 Honors
3 January 2018

“The Sign in My Father’s Hands” Do you know how it feels to constantly be picked on for your race? Martin Espada’s free verse poem, “The Sign in My Father’s Hands,” directly portrays what it is like to be a child, more specifically a Latino child, who is forced at a young age to learn what it is like to constantly be treated unfairly and a victim of racism. Martin Espada uses his father's story and what he had to witness as a child to convey the theme of how Latinos are often victims of racism and constantly treated unfairly. The poem uses symbolism to show how it is possible to get through racism. The narrator believes that his father is a symbol of Christ. The concept of his father being able to return “from the netherworld / easily as riding the elevator to apartment 14-F,” directly paints the

This shows how the little boy looks at his father in complete awe and thinks that he can do no wrong. Christ is God-like too many people and the boy puts his father on the same level as Christ. The Brewery cops could only “watch in drunken disappointment,” could be viewed as all of the Christians who watched as Jesus was freed from the struggle which is known as life on Earth. The last line of the poem, “I searched my father’s hands / for a sign of the miracle” indicates that he looked for the wounds that Jesus was said to have had on his hands from being nailed to the cross. This connects to the theme of racism because the hole in the father's hands would have been the only thing that directly connected him to Christ. Which would have explained why the father was able to tolerate the unjust cruelty that he faced every day due to being a victim of racism because it is said that Jesus was able to get through any and every hardship thrown his way. In the second stanza, the narrator says, “in 1964, I had never tasted beer, / and no one told me about the picket signs.” This can be seen as