In Lives in Limbo, Roberto G. Gonzales dissects the disastrous effects of US immigration policy on young Latina/os struggling in the often untouched, unnoticed, uncared for, American underbelly. Through a striking ethnography, Gonzalez examines 150 illuminating case-studies of young undocumented Latina/os, shedding light on their shared experience in the struggle for legitimacy in the United States - their lives, effectively, in limbo. He develops two major groups with which to classify the struggling youth: the college-goers, like Cesar, who received strong marks in high school and was able to land himself a spot within the UC system, and the early-exiters, like Silvia, who was unable to attend college, resigned to a paranoid life plagued …show more content…
Both the early-exiters and college-goers share these environmental realities, often times living in unsafe neighborhoods, dealing with multiple relocations, cramped living conditions, and overworked parents. The spatial segregation that perpetuates these realities is executed on class lines, where predominantly immigrant neighborhoods generally have more poverty, and as a result have a higher-crime rate. Gonzales explains how this process is cyclical, poorer people have a higher propensity to resort to criminal activity, subsequently the crime rate is higher, this makes less wealthy people want to live in predominantly Latina/o communities, keeping property values low. If the K-12 education largely bases its funding off of property taxes, Latina/os are more likely to receive a subpar education - thus the masquerade of education as the “great equalizer” comes plummeting down, both the college-goers and the early-exiters are subject to systemic failures. Furthermore, the groups not only share similar economic/financial constraints but they both are partially paralyzed by a sense of paranoia, of fear about the consequences of their undocumented status and the status of their family …show more content…
Through the experiences of over 150 individuals, the apparent divisiveness of American public policy and political climate comes to the forefront in a dispiriting dichotomy of the undocumented experience coping in the
Part Three of the book “Just Like Us” written by Helen Thorpe is comprised of illegal undocumented individuals residing in Denver Colorado. The individuals consist of a group of four Mexican young adults all with the dream of one day attending college and finally obtaining a legal status within the United States. In this portion of the readings, Yadira, Marisela, Clara, and Elissa are entering their senior year at their University and have defined the odds of successfully completing college while maintaining an illegal status. Helen Thorpe clearly demonstrates a passion in tracking individuals that are determined to become legal citizens within society; however, lack the proper advocacy and documentation to do so. Part Three of the book envelops the complexity of maintaining a legal status among society members through the lives of these four influential young ladies striving to achieve higher education in the
Even if these students have achieved the highest honors and have the brains of an engineer, they aren’t able to reach their greatest potential because they simply do not have documents. Those who are undocumented are doomed to working backbreaking jobs that pay substantially below minimum wage. Spare Parts has challenged and shown me that it takes an immigrant double, or even triple the amount of toil to achieve anything in life. These boys endeavoured through adversities that many of us will never encounter. Luis luckily had a green card, but Lorenzo, Oscar, and Cristian were all living under the fear of deportation. They all wanted more after graduating from Carl Hayden but their dreams quickly vanished because the reality was that they’re illegal immigrants. When we hear the word “immigration”, we automatically think “illegal”, but what we don’t see is that these illegal immigrants are trying to reach their own American Dreams by coming to America. As the author includes Patrick J. Buchanan’s perspective on immigrants, “...families came to the United States to leech off government services.” (35), it shows us how immigrants are perceived.
Harvest of the Empire is a valuable tool to gaining a better understanding of Latinos. This book helps people understand how varied Latino’s in the United States are. The author also helped give insight as to how Americans reacts to differences within itself. It does this by giving a description of the struggles that every Latino immigrant faced entering the United States. These points of emphasis of the book were explained thoroughly in the identification of the key points, the explanation of the intersection of race, ethnicity, and class, in addition to the overall evaluation of the book.
Gonzalez, Juan. Harvest of Empire a History of Latinos in America. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc, 2000.
Eleanor Roosevelt said, “the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” That statement holds strong for immigrants in America. Equal access to opportunities allows immigrants to achieve the American dream. Their success correlates with America’s success because of the contributions immigrants provide to America. Unfortunately, the current immigration policy in America denies many immigrants the American dream. It is crucial to understand the historical context of immigration in America. Initially, most immigrants were from Europe and were not restricted by any immigration laws. Now, most immigrants come from Latin America but are restricted to severe immigration laws. The Latino/a community is one of the most severely affected groups because the current immigration system disproportionally affects Latino/as. Recognizing how the experience of Latino/a immigrants have been both similar and different in the past from other immigrant groups and dispelling common misconceptions about Latino/as today bring an awareness how Latino/as are affected.
Imagine seeing 10,000 of your classmates walking out of your school because they wanted a better education - a better way of life. In the 1960s’ Chicano students were being “pushed out”(Esparza) of school or being pushed towards vocational programs. East L.A was home to schools were “one out of every four Chicano’s completed high school”(Esparza). Instructors and the school board alike did not have an interest in helping Chicanos finish school to become someone other than a laborer and was expected of them to keep being a laborer. In “Taking Back the Schools”, Sal Castro a high school counselor claims, “I think the bottom line is the lack of concern of the teachers towards the kids and whether the kids were really getting an education or not...the reality set in that the teachers weren’t really concern for the kids.”(Esparza).
The Latino Threat Narrative has excluded Latinx from the sense of national belonging of the United States. Nation is a product of nationalism, which is “an imagined political community– and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson, 6). In other words, nationalism is a socially, psychologically, and politically constructed community created and imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that community. It is social and psychological process that makes people believe they are connected to one another and share ties. However, nationalism is limited and exclusive, not everyone has the privilege of being part of that community. For instance, “the nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries beyond which lie other nations”(Anderson, 7). In other words, nationalism divides communities and creates restrictions and prohibitions that are similar to immigration laws. The hegemony of American nationalism include people who are only of European descent, born in the United States and speaks only English. Particularly, Gonzalez due to her illegal status she was not welcome to be part of the American nationalism. Therefore, she was forced out and excluded from the American narrative. In this case, nationalism is a form of oppression against marginalized groups. Nationalism divides those who do not fit in the status quo. As a result, the idea of nationalism divides vulnerable communities from entering the narrative. Thus, the American patriarchal form of nationalism transforms into American Exceptionalism in which the United States brands
Montoya, Margret E. "Masks and Identify," and "Masks and Resistance," in The Latino/a Condition: A Critical Reader New York: New York University Press, 1998.
In Cristina Henríquez’s novel The Book of Unknown Americans she presents her readers with a striking and dramatic tale of her definition of what it means to be an American with a certain community, and this community who just so happen to be composed of Latino immigrants in the United States. Through the trials and tribulation that is day to day life for these people with the added constraint of discrimination the group continues to prevail as a positive community. With this and a mostly pathos or emotional approach, Henríquez establishes an effective argument on the reality of who these “unknown” Americans truly are and not just the negative view that many Americans may gauge the group: such as criminals or intellectually inferior. With the utilization of the
“This article focuses on the interactions between such favorable and unfavorable contexts during what I call the transition into illegality. I conceptualize this process as the set of experiences that result from shifting contexts along the life course, providing different meanings to undocumented status and animating the experience of illegality at late adolescence and into adulthood. The
Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, N.J. [u.a.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004. Print.
Valenzuela utilizes various compilations of research to construct her exceptional argument regarding the issue of subtractive schooling with regards to 2nd generational immigrant students. She thoroughly analyzes and assesses the multitude of differences between 1st generation and 2nd generation students and their affinity for education. She divides the topic into 3 categories and asserts how each one adds to the issue of inadequate education for Mexican/Mexican-American students in the US public school system. Her research is conducted at Seguin (pseudonym) High School in Houston, Texas. She examines the effects of substandard education in regards to the students and their academic performance. She uses quantitative and qualitative research
Jose Antonio Vargas’s article on My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant is a writing about his childhood journey from the Philippines to the United States as an Undocumented Immigrant. Vargas writes this article to emphasize the topic of immigrant and undocumented immigrant in the United States. He uses all three appeals: pathos, ethos, and logic in his writing, in specific, he mostly uses pathos throughout of his entire article with a purpose for the reader to sympathize and to feel compassion for him. The use of these appeals attract many readers, they can feel and understand his purpose is to ask for others to join and support other people who undocumented immigrant like himself. In addition, it gives other undocumented immigrant people courage
Mari and her family are in an unstable housing cycle, the family’s inability to afford their rent becomes clear and homelessness becomes one of the main points of Mari’s character. In addition to being a queer Latina, Mari belongs to a single-parent immigrant household and is dealing with an unsuccessful educational experience. Mari’s mother work long hours at a minimum wage job, and Mari feels a strong sense of responsibility to help financially. In Latino households, we are taught to place family above one’s self. The tradition of Latino teenagers hustling to help family stay above water is important. It
In Limbo reside the unbaptized and the virtuous pagans, who, though not sinful, did not accept Christ. Limbo shares many characteristics with the Asphodel Meadows; thus the guiltless damned are punished by living in a deficient form of Heaven. Without baptism ("the portal of the faith that you embrace")[6] they lacked the hope for something greater than rational minds can conceive. Limbo includes green fields and a castle with seven gates to represent the seven virtues. The castle is the dwelling place of the wisest men of antiquity, including Virgil himself, as well as the Persian polymath Avicenna. In the castle Dante meets the poets Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan; the Amazon queen Penthesilea; the mathematician Euclid; the scientist Pedanius Dioscorides; the statesman Cicero; the first doctor Hippocrates; the philosophers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Averroes; the historical figures Lucretia, Lucius Junius Brutus, and Julius Caesar in his role as Roman general ("in his armor, falcon-eyed");[7] mythological characters Hector, Electra, Camilla, Latinus, and Orpheus; and many othe...