Jane The Virgin Sparknotes

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Episode sixty-one of "Jane the Virgin" illustrates multiple negative experiences that the characters experience in their normal, everyday lives in order to portray the real experiences that immigrants can face and how even when someone is not doing anything wrong, they still receive negative reactions and feel alienated in society. This episode of "Jane the Virgin" tackled the extremely prevalent issue of immigration, a naturally reoccurring theme that all three of the Villanueva women, Jane, the main character, Xiomara, Jane's mother, and Alba, Jane's grandmother, have to deal with. One of the most shocking statements said in this episode is said when Alba is working at the gift shop in the hotel she works at. While performing her job like …show more content…

When telling Jane about the discrimination that a Hispanic woman faced while she was at work, Alba passionately recites the preamble of the constitution and questions Jane, "how much of the preamble do you think she knows?" (16:51-17:05). In this TV show, Alba represents a modern, realistic immigrant experience and illustrates one of the many struggles that immigrants have to face, even after they become legal citizens. Even if an immigrant does a lot of work and spends a lot of time and energy to become legal citizens, all immigrants are treated the same, regardless of status. The work that immigrants may do in order to gain citizenship and American status are not taken into consideration and instead, all immigrants are placed into one generalized category and all treated in the same negative manner. A study on how the United States mainstream media represents immigrants performed by Storm and Alcock found that the analysis of U.S. media "yielded three metaphors that shaped the way the American public viewed these immigrants - IMMIGRATION AS DANGEROUS WATERS, IMMIGRATION AS INVASION, and IMMIGRATION AS DISEASE OR BURDEN" (445). The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, which were the two newspapers that were analyzed for this study, frequently use water metaphors to portray the large number of immigrants arriving in the U.S. as a dangerous disaster occurring in the U.S. Frequently, news media reinforces the subordination of immigrants and continuously illustrates them in a negative way. Regardless of who the individual immigrants are, the media only represents them as dangerous immigrants that need to be deported immediately. Instead of only focusing on the deportation of immigrants

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