In the poem “La Migra” the author, Pat Mora, describes a terrible situation between a border patrol officer and a female Mexican immigrant. The poem illustrates an immigration officer who abuses his authority against a young Mexican girl. The author uses a stanza to display each side of the story. Overall this poem describes the actions taken by a border patrol officer who abuses a young Mexican immigrant who eventually escapes his authority. The first stanza portrays the officer mistreating and abusing the young girl. The author begins by using the perspective of a corrupt border patrol officer who desires to take advantage of a young female immigrant. The officer threatens the Mexican immigrant by saying “You can hide and run, / but you can't get away / because I have a jeep (lines 5-7). In this statement, the officer is portrayed as a very demanding and powerful man. He threatens the young female and warns her that if she attempts to run that he will run her down in his jeep and she will not be able to get away. He uses his authority against the young immigrant to make her feel...
Martinez’s story is not so much one that pieces together the events of the crash, nor the lives of the three youths, but it is an immigrant’s tale, discovered through the crossings of the various Chavez family members and profiles of Cheranos in Mexico.
The language of Gloria Anzaldua’s “We Call Them Greasers” can be used to disseminate the culturally constructed codes and conventions which influence the realities of both the author, and the poems’ fictional speaker. The poem illustrates the intolerant and brutal nature of border rangers as they sought to rid Mexican border towns of their inhabitants. As well as its language, the subject matter of the poem, too, is telling of the author’s cultural influences, which influence the stance she takes on the subject matter. Anzaldua constructs the poem’s speaker, however, to be a person who holds views which are in staunch opposition to her own. This use of clear contradiction helps readers identify underlying messages meant to be conveyed and understood beyond the text of the poem itself.
Not only is this a beautiful example of her rhyme but also a great illustration of her ability to imagine and recreate a scene, it feels as though you yourself are leaping and bounding to freedom as you read this. In lines 17-20 a questioning of how she will define herself once she escapes arises, she asks if she can truly call herself an American. Beautifully saying,
100). In social movements, the counterstances can be seen as the violent retaliations of an oppressed group of people, such as the Los Angeles riots in 1992 and the Ferguson lootings which occurred recently. These riots are not a spontaneous act of rebellion, but instead are developed from concentrated amounts of stress and inability to create a strong enough voice with political merit. Estrella is a character that develops around the stress of social inequality. Her lifestyle is not standard of “normal American” children where education takes precedents over childhood labor. Viramontes creates Estrella’s background to allow the character to grow through constant stress. Estrella is conscious of her social standing; the experience she had at the baseball game when the “sheets of high-powered lights beamed on the playing field” (pg. 59) induced fear and stress that made Estrella want to retaliate against “La Migra”. Melina Pinales elaborated in class that when Estrella’s mother, Petra, says “you tell them the birth certificates are under the feet of Jesus,” the mother is saying that everyone is a child under God and a child of the earth therefore Estrella should have nothing to fear. Adding to this, Estrella has legitimate paperwork proving her citizenship in the United States. However, due to the nature of Estrella’s work, her
La Migra is a poem about two children a girl and a boy, who are playing a game about Mexicans crossing the American border. This poem is divided in two stanzas, because it expresses two different points of view; the girls point of view that is pretty much as the point of view an Hispanic or any immigrant would have, and the boys point of view that would be the point of view a racist border patrol or just anyone racist would have. Change in the point of view of the two children implies realism into the poem La Migra. The main point of this poem is to remind the reader about human feelings, and remind the reader about illegal immigration into the United States. Pat Mora uses Image, blank verse, and anaphora to develop her theme of immigration
This poem captures the immigrant experience between the two worlds, leaving the homeland and towards the new world. The poet has deliberately structured the poem in five sections each with a number of stanzas to divide the different stages of the physical voyage. Section one describes the refugees, two briefly deals with their reason for the exodus, three emphasises their former oppression, fourth section is about the healing effect of the voyage and the concluding section deals with the awakening of hope. This restructuring allows the poet to focus on the emotional and physical impact of the journey.
...community, equal rights and the right to follow your roots) with the central focus of the poem. As Susan Bassnett states in her essay Bilingual Poetry: A Chicano Phenomenon , there is a “Latin American tradition of the poet who occupies a prominent place in the struggle for freedom and national unity”, and as Cervantes and Gonzales demonstrated, the poet’s role in Latin America has not been diminished.
The United States of America has the largest foreign-born population in the world. With nearly thirteen percent of the total population being foreign-born, one may find it hard to imagine an immigrant-free country (U.S. Bureau of the Census). Immigration has been an integral part of the United States’ overall success and the country’s economy since it was established and without it, would have never been founded at all. Although there are some negative issues associated with immigration and many native-born Americans believe to be more of a problem than a solution, overall it actually has a positive effect. Immigrants in America, among other things, fill jobs where native-born Americans may not want to work or cannot work, they contribute to Social Services and Medicaid through taxes and they help provide the backbone of America, especially by working jobs that natives may have not even considered.
Although the little girl doesn’t listen to the mother the first time she eventually listens in the end. For example, in stanzas 1-4, the little girl asks if she can go to the Freedom March not once, but twice even after her mother had already denied her the first time. These stanzas show how the daughter is a little disobedient at first, but then is able to respect her mother’s wishes. In stanzas 5 and 6, as the little girl is getting ready the mother is happy and smiling because she knows that her little girl is going to be safe, or so she thinks. By these stanzas the reader is able to tell how happy the mother was because she thought her daughter would be safe by listening to her and not going to the March. The last two stanzas, 7 and 8, show that the mother senses something is wrong, she runs to the church to find nothing, but her daughter’s shoe. At this moment she realizes that her baby is gone. These stanzas symbolize that even though her daughter listened to her she still wasn’t safe and is now dead. The Shoe symbolizes the loss the mother is going through and her loss of hope as well. This poem shows how elastic the bond between the daughter and her mother is because the daughter respected her mother’s wish by not going to the March and although the daughter is now dead her mother will always have her in her heart. By her having her
The struggle to find a place inside an un-welcoming America has forced the Latino to recreate one. The Latino feels out of place, torn from the womb inside of America's reality because she would rather use it than know it (Paz 226-227). In response, the Mexican women planted the seeds of home inside the corral*. These tended and potted plants became her burrow of solace and place of acceptance. In the comfort of the suns slices and underneath the orange scents, the women were free. Still the questions pounded in the rhythm of street side whispers. The outside stare thundered in pulses, you are different it said. Instead of listening she tried to instill within her children the pride of language, song, and culture. Her roots weave soul into the stubborn soil and strength grew with each blossom of the fig tree (Goldsmith).
Martinez, Demetria. 2002. “Solidarity”. Border Women: Writing from la Frontera.. Castillo, Debra A & María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 168- 188.
What is the vision of the “American Dream” Hispanic immigrants believe is waiting across the border? What kind of discrimination does the Hispanic public face in their daily lives in the U.S? What kinds of social mobility do Hispanics have in store after crossing the borders of the U.S? These questions define the lives of Hispanic immigrants. The importance of finding out how exactly these topics influence their lives however, is pertinent to finding the hardships and daily boundaries Hispanics face in their day-to-day routines in the United States.
In a story of identity and empowerment, Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem “Borderbus” revolves around two Honduran women grappling with their fate regarding a detention center in the United States after crawling up the spine of Mexico from Honduras. While one grapples with their survival, fixated on the notion that their identities are the ultimate determinant for their future, the other remains fixated on maintaining their humanity by insisting instead of coming from nothingness they are everything. Herrera’s poem consists entirely of the dialogue between the two women, utilizing diction and imagery to emphasize one’s sense of isolation and empowerment in the face of adversity and what it takes to survive in America.
The poem “Exile” by Julia Alvarez dramatizes the conflicts of a young girl’s family’s escape from an oppressive dictatorship in the Dominican Republic to the freedom of the United States. The setting of this poem starts in the city of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, which was renamed for the brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo; however, it eventually changes to New York when the family succeeds to escape. The speaker is a young girl who is unsophisticated to the world; therefore, she does not know what is happening to her family, even though she surmises that something is wrong. The author uses an extended metaphor throughout the poem to compare “swimming” and escaping the Dominican Republic. Through the line “A hurried bag, allowing one toy a piece,” (13) it feels as if the family were exiled or forced to leave its country. The title of the poem “Exile,” informs the reader that there was no choice for the family but to leave the Dominican Republic, but certain words and phrases reiterate the title. In this poem, the speaker expresser her feeling about fleeing her home and how isolated she feels in the United States.
The contrast between the Mexican world versus the Anglo world has led Anzaldua to a new form of self and consciousness in which she calls the “New Mestiza” (one that recognizes and understands her duality of race). Anzaldua lives in a constant place of duality where she is on the opposite end of a border that is home to those that are considered “the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel and the mulato” (25). It is the inevitable and grueling clash of two very distinct cultures that produces the fear of the “unknown”; ultimately resulting in alienation and social hierarchy. Anzaldua, as an undocumented woman, is at the bottom of the hierarchy. Not only is she a woman that is openly queer, she is also carrying the burden of being “undocumented”. Women of the borderlands are forced to carry two degrading labels: their gender that makes them seem nothing more than a body and their “legal” status in this world. Many of these women only have two options due to their lack of English speaking abilities: either leave their homeland – or submit themselves to the constant objectification and oppression. According to Anzaldua, Mestizo culture was created by men because many of its traditions encourage women to become “subservient to males” (39). Although Coatlicue is a powerful Aztec figure, in a male-dominated society, she was still seen