Many emotions and thoughts were elicited in me while reading Enrique’s Journey and attending class. I felt empathetic, intrigued, and frustrated because of the systematic oppression that works against people of color. I also enjoyed learning about the resiliency and strength that people must overcome strenuous obstacles to succeed. Currently, I have been learning about the effect of mass incarceration and how previous policies have continued to oppress and criminalize the most vulnerable populations: people from a lower socioeconomic status and people of color. The mass incarceration system has continuously oppressed, used, and devalued people of color since the era of slavery. Slavery started when there was a demand in labor to aid the production …show more content…
There is a prevalent history of drug and alcohol abuse in the household with each Latino client that I serve, except for one. Whether they were the ones struggling with the addiction or they were the spouse or child of the abusers, addiction runs deep within the Latino culture. This was also highlighted in the novel, Enrique’s Journey, when we read about the intimate struggle that Enrique faced with drugs and alcohol. Addressing and providing appropriate treatment for the addiction that people suffer with would be a more effective way to help the issue with mass incarceration. With Enrique’s story, his addiction became a way for him to escape the reality that he was living in and helped him cope with the loss and abandonment of people in his life. Although his story and poverty from his childhood took place in a different country, these are similar struggles that many people of color face in the United States. There is so much trauma that can take place when a person is living in poverty that it is incredibly hard to rise above it without the proper resources and support. The law is restricting the freedom and opportunity for African Americans and Latinos in the U.S. They are set up to go into the system because they are racially profiled, given harsher sentences, and given no support to rise above the
Most black Americans are under the control of the criminal justice today whether in parole or probation or whether in jail or prison. Accomplishments of the civil rights association have been challenged by mass incarceration of the African Americans in fighting drugs in the country. Although the Jim Crow laws are not so common, many African Americans are still arrested for very minor crimes. They remain disfranchised and marginalized and trapped by criminal justice that has named them felons and refuted them their rights to be free of lawful employment and discrimination and also education and other public benefits that other citizens enjoy. There is exists discernment in voting rights, employment, education and housing when it comes to privileges. In the, ‘the new Jim crow’ mass incarceration has been described to serve the same function as the post civil war Jim crow laws and pre civil war slavery. (Michelle 16) This essay would defend Michelle Alexander’s argument that mass incarcerations represent the ‘new Jim crow.’
Learning is important for countless reasons, the most important reason being that it molds a person into who he or she is. What people choose to learn, and also what they choose not to, create the core of their opinions as individuals. Though people do not admit it or openly declare it, it is fair to say almost everyone is self centered. Because of this, and the fact that learning dramatically affects a person, learning is not only thrilling, but also expressive. Furthermore, since learning is expressive, its meaning varies from person to person, therefore making each person’s experiences with learning unique and life changing.
Fort Morgan is a small town community with a small population. This means that it easy for community members to bond and know each other. One way that the people could bond is through books. More specifically, the One City One Book program. The One City One Book program is a way for the community to get together through discussions of a piece of literacy. The book that would be a good option to use is Enrique’s Journey because it is a nonfiction piece of work that has many lessons to teach people, and it is all through a story of a young boy’s journey. This program would benefit Fort Morgan with Enrique’s Journey because it enlightens the people of the community about the hardships other people have that are not in America, it is an educational
Life is like a game of blackjack where we unknowingly are dealt good or bad cards. This unpredictability makes it difficult to gamble decisions. Unfortunately many factors can lead to the bad card where in both the game and life, people are trying to prevent us from achieving the goal. There are two choices to change the outcome however, we may either give up (fold) or we may take a chance (call). The beauty of taking the risk is that if lucky, life gives you that much-needed card. When dealt that winning card, a person is immediately uplifted. That one good hand drives a person to outweigh the pros from the cons and continue to strive for the winning pot or in this case, the goal in life. Enrique in Sonia Nazario’s “Enrique’s Journey,” is dealt both the good and bad cards in life, as he undergoes a battle of being pushed internally to continue while also being pulled externally to quit, thus leading him to unearth himself as a worthy human being while on the journey to the U.S; sadly however, his arrival in the U.S refutes what he clearly envisioned for himself.
In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander states that we still use our criminal justice system to “label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage i...
For immigrants, reuniting with parents who left them is a huge problem in the U.S. Children who reunite with their parents after many years have a lot of problems with the parents. The parents and children tend to argue, the children have buried anger, and both have an idealized concept of each other. According to Los Angeles’s Newcomer School, a school for newly arrived immigrants which is referenced in Enrique’s Journey, a bit more than half of want to talk to the counselor about their problems. The main problem Murillo, the school’s counselor, says is mostly family problems. Murillo says that many parent-child meetings are all very similar and identical to each other. Some of the similarities are that idealized notions of each other disappear, children felt bitter before going to the U.S., and that many children have buried rage. Mothers say that the separations between them and child was worth it because of the money earned and the advantages in America. However, many children said that they would rather have less money and food if it meant their mothers would stay with them.
The work by Victor M. Rios entitled Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness depict ways in which policing and incarceration affect inequalities that exist in society. In this body of work I will draw on specific examples from the works of Victor M. Rios and Michelle Alexander to fulfill the tasks of this project. Over the course of the semester and by means of supplemental readings, a few key points are highlighted: how race and gender inequalities correlate to policing and incarceration, how laws marginalize specific groups, and lastly how policing and incarceration perpetuate the very inequalities that exist within American society.
This paper will utilize research-based data presented in the scholarly article "Associations Between Ethnic Labels and Substance Use Among Hispanic/Latino" by Daniel Soto Wood, Lourdes Baezconde-Garbanati, James Thing, and Jennifer B. Unger to explore the relationship between ethnic labels and an increased chances of substance abuse among Hispanic/Latino adolescents in the Los Angeles area. I will analysis and investigate how War on Drug propaganda has contributed to the creation of ethnic labels that stigmatize and oppress Mexican/Hispanic communities today. The topics presented in this paper are controversial and serve to call attention to the ways the Hispanic/Latino individuals continue to be discriminated against and marginalized in the United
Did you know that over 200 million people illegally leave their country in search of a new one? Immigrants from all around the world travel to the United States for a better life for themselves and their family. However, making a living in the U. S is not that easy. Majority of illegal immigrants travel by train or smugglers, such as Enrique, from Sonia Nazario’s Enrique’s Journey. Life for immigrants living in the United States and those trying to leave their homeland is like a game of chess. In Nazario's, she describes the utter dehumanization that immigrants face. In her work, she endeavors to humanize significant characters through her writing style. Nazario also points out the perpetual
She must go. She can’t seem to support her son otherwise. With tears in her eyes, she bids goodbye and departs for the United States. Now, every Sunday, her son runs to the payphone, anxious to hear his mother’s comforting voice. But despite the weekly phone calls and toys he gets in the mail, he knows something is missing - his mother’s presence. Parental separation in this example, clearly is harmful to their relationship. Similarly, separation of parent to child, in the nonfiction novel Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario, is clearly a key theme. After leaving Enrique at age five, the relationship between Enrique and his mother, Lourdes, is not the same. Enrique’s separation from his mother eventually leads him to going on a journey to reunite
Would a life in America really make things better for an immigrant? In Sonia Nazario’s Enrique’s Journey, this question correlates with one of the many topics of the book. One of the topics is examining the approaches of immigration, as well as creating the social awareness of it. Nazario pulls it off well in the prologue by presenting a typical sob story of the many immigrant mothers of South America, which is one of the top five countries where its people immigrate to the United States. She also presents the various risks Central Americans have to go through such as the rides on the trains, how one can lose their limbs or life on them. This will make her goal of social awareness possible, and convince one to make a change.
The novel Enrique’s Journey is about love and about family. When we first start reading the book we see in the first chapter a young mother talking to her son. The mother of the child will not look him in his face. The little boy Enrique has no idea of where his mother is going. The little boy feels lost without his mother. The mother of the little boy want even let no one bathe or feed her child. Little Enrique loves his mother so much, without his mother he is so shy. In the novel Enrique journey we see a variety of push and pull factors which are clarified in the prologue and chapter 1 of the novel. The novel shows the story of a young boy dangerous journey to reunite with his mother which he has not seen in years. In the prologue we
According to statistics since the early 1970’s there has been a 500% increase in the number of people being incarcerated with an average total of 2.2 million people behind bars. The increase in rate of people being incarcerated has also brought about an increasingly disproportionate racial composition. The jails and prisons have a high rate of African Americans incarcerated with an average of 900,000 out of the 2.2 million incarcerateed being African American. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 1 in 6 African American males has been incarcerated at some point in time as of the year 2001. In theory if this trend continues it is estimated that about 1 in 3 black males being born can be expected to spend time in prison and some point in his life. One in nine African American males between the ages of 25 and 29 are currently incarcerated. Although the rate of imprisonment for women is considerably lower than males African American women are incarc...
Coates’ article “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” opens with the story of a man named Daniel Moynihan. Moynihan, born to a broken family in the great depression era, entered politics and developed to become an important political figure in the labor department during the 1960’s. The principal belief of Moynihan was that unemployment was destructive to the potential social mobility of the poor, a lynchpin of the American dream. Once the civil rights movement gained momentum, Moynihan gained interest on how his theory affects black families specifically and began to research this topic. The results of his research showed just how devastating the effects of three hundred of years of slavery and institutionalized racism were on black families and how much worse off they were than white families in general.
The most problematic conclusion about Mass Incarceration, whatever the causes or practices, is that currently America has had the highest national prison rates in the world; furthermore, the rates of minorities (particularly African Americans) are extraordinarily disproportionate to the rates of incarcerated Caucasians. Despite the overall rise in incarceration rates since the 1980s, the crime rates have not been reduced as would be expected. Researchers, activists, and politicians alike are now taking a closer look at Mass Incarceration and how it affects society on a larger scale. The purpose of this paper is to examine the anatomy of Mass Incarceration for a better understanding of its importance as a dominant social issue and its ultimate relation to practice of social work. More specifically the populations affected by mass incarceration and the consequences implacable to social justice. The context of historical perspectives on mass incarceration will be analyzed as well as insight to the current social welfare policies on the