Something in Between is Melissa de la Cruz‘s comeback to YA contemporary genre. It came out last week. You can now buy it wherever books are sold.
The story tackles the American dream of a teenager named Jasmine de los Santos. If you haven’t got the time to pick it up, Hollywood News Source listed five reasons why you should remedy that immediately. This book is just in time for Filipino American History Month.
tight-knit family
Are you tired of the glaring absences of parental figure on YA books? There is a tight knit ensemble of family and friends in Something in Between. It’s particularly heartwarming because it weaves the rich family oriented culture of Filipinos. We hardly get to see that. You’ll get to know our foods and delicacies; how we have so many relatives that isn’t even biological related to us, but we call them Lola (grandmother), Aunty, Tito (uncle). It’s pretty funny.
female friendships
Melissa embedded complex teenage issues and didn’t brush it under the rugs. As example, girls getting insecure of each other; and the amazing thing is you
It is the political book that didn’t alienate people of colors and our existence in the US history. Jasmine’s story tackled hard-hitting topic such as racial identity, the harmful stereotypes, oppression immigrant experience in daily basis. It also examines the privilege, and what is it like to be a minority in the US.
dizzy romance
While the 1 to 4 reasons I listed are very noble, I would still say the romance are one of the best things about it. The love interest, Royce Blakely isn’t your standard YA boyfriend. He’s a dyslexic, biracial Mexican-American boy. His characterization instantly grabbed me. I love it when I get to read male characters who have vulnerabilities within them. He’s quite a loner, who puts a lot of time studying with his tutors, he’s determined to prove he is worth more than his family’s reputation.
The romance is
This book was published in 1981 with an immense elaboration of media hype. This is a story of a young Mexican American who felt disgusted with being pointed out as a minority and was unhappy with affirmative action programs although he had gained advantages from them. He acknowledged the gap that was created between him and his parents as the penalty immigrants ought to pay to develop and grow into American culture. And he confessed that he was bewildered to see other Hispanic teachers and students determined to preserve their ethnicity and traditions by asking for such issues to be dealt with as departments of Chicano studies and minority literature classes. A lot of critics criticized him as a defector of his heritage, but there are a few who believed him to be a sober vote in opposition to the political intemperance of the 1960s and 1970s.
Instead of loving and caring for her baby, and forgetting about Danny, she became worse than him. Rodriguez presents many aspects of the minority class that live in the United States, specifically the South Bronx. Even though the cases presented in Rodriguez’s short stories are difficult to mellow with, they are a reality that is constant in many lives. Everyday someone goes through life suffering, due to lack of responsibility, lack of knowledge, submission to another entity or just lack of wanting to have a better life. People that go through these situations are people who have not finished studying, so they have fewer opportunities in life.
- - - - - "American Minority Literature." Notes. 27 September 2000. Yancey, William L. Ericksen, Eugene P.; and Juliani, Richard N. "Emergent
Through our readings of the Mexicans in the U.S. and the African-American experience modules, we begin to understand the formation of identity through the hardships minorities faced from discrimination. In this paper, I am going to compare and contrast the ideas of identity shown through the readings. These two modules exemplify the theme of identity. We see how Blacks and Latinos tried to find their identity both personally and as a culture through the forced lifestyles they had to live.
Since its founding, racial tensions have plagued the United States. Our history is one of racism and intolerance. From legal slavery in our first hundred years to fear mongering over Chinese immigrants, “No Irish Need Apply” to a presidential nominee threatening to deport 11 million illegal Latino immigrants, racism scourges our nation. How society sees a person’s race affects how they see themselves, how they see others of their own race, how they view other races, and their experiences growing up. In Zora Neale Hurston’s piece, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” she explains coming to know herself as “Zora” instead of “a little colored girl;” she explains how she is Zora of Orange County and it’s only in contrast to whites that she is colored. On the other hand, Anzaldúa’s piece “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” looks at life when no one recognizes your race, including those in it. While both Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” and Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” deal with the differences in race and racial tensions in the US, they detail vastly different struggles faced by minorities.
Ruiz, Delia. Women of Color in Modern Society. New York, NY: Harper and Row Press,
Family in the novel is described as a group of people that have a unit or bond that they share each day
On Being Young-A Woman-and Colored an essay by Marita Bonner addresses what it means to be black women in a world of white privilege. Bonner reflects about a time when she was younger, how simple her life was, but as she grows older she is forced to work hard to live a life better than those around her. Ultimately, she is a woman living with the roles that women of all colors have been constrained to. Critics, within the last 20 years, believe that Marita Bonners’ essay primarily focuses on the double consciousness ; while others believe that she is focusing on gender , class , “economic hardships, and discrimination” . I argue that Bonner is writing her essay about the historical context of oppression forcing women into intersectional oppression by explaining the naturality of racial discrimination between black and white, how time and money equate to the American Dream, and lastly how gender discrimination silences women, specifically black women.
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is the blood flowing out from a bleeding, injured America. Only a tragic symptom of a larger trauma, one can trace this blood and book back to the greater issue: the deep gash of racism. Overt and obnoxious, the gash screams for attention; it is large and apparent and seen by all. It exists in the public space, displayed for any to see, undeniable and visible and rambunctious. But Rankine’s Citizen is not that gash. It is none of these things, yet calls attention to the existence of the gash through its depiction of the myriad microaggressions that plague race relations in America. Claiming instead the private, personal space as its territory, microaggressions describe the various ways in which racism
The immense pressure caused by always trying to prove to the world that she was enough resulted in a lacking of social awareness and identity. Andrea doesn’t appear to know how to act herself when she is around matty for example the text says “She was always bringing up sex around Matty so she could demonstrate how cool she was with it.”( 2) It doesn’t appear that Andrea has had a lot of practice with boys because she's been so focused on school and being accepted in society; so that now she’s trying to catch up awkwardly trying to feel her way through. This also shows that now she’s also trying to juggle being accepted by her peers and the difficulty she’s having with both. Andrea constantly tries to conform to what she thinks her peers views are before she knows them. For example, when she sees Parker for the first time in college and attempts to make conversation by ridiculing students who played in the mud only to find out Parker thought it seemed fun; the narrator says “Feeling drab to her core, Andrea searched for something else to say, but came up with nothing”.(9) Andrea is overcompensating for what she lacks by trying to act like someone she isn’t, but who she thinks Parker is. Andrea’s views on how things are or ought to be is a constant recurring flaw that prevents her from making the relationships she wants so desperately to
Jasmine by Bharti Mukherjee is a novel about what it means to become American. Jasmine was born in a small village in Hasnapur, India. However, she did not stay there long. After her husband was murdered, she moved to the United States, where she transformed into a fully American woman. While she became accustomed to American life and traditions, she never forgot her experiences in India and through every step of her journey in America. Jasmine had five different names throughout her life, and each one represented a different version of herself, as she gradually shifted towards more American values. Although she had different names and different identities, she always held true to her core beliefs and stayed true to herself. Each of the different names represents a distinctly different time in Jasmine’s life, and while outwardly she may seem like an alternative version of herself, she remains the strong willed and adventurous girl despite her situation and her surroundings.
Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s West Side Story (USA, 1961), a classic American film, and Mira Nair’s The Namesake (USA, 2006), a more contemporary film, both tell the story of young adults seeking out the American Dream. In both West Side Story and The Namesake, we see young people taking chances at love, while living out their lives and the American Dream. We experience the challenges that come with interracial relationships and the cultural influences that sadly put an end to the relationships. Both movies capture the lives of two different ethnic groups, Puerto Ricans and Bengalis, shining a light on issues of diversity such as race, interracial relationships, and cultural assimilation. While telling the stories of American immigrants, West Side Story and The Namesake touch upon the most pressing issues affecting immigrant groups at two very different times in American history. From the highflying musical numbers of West Side Story to the heartfelt moments in The Namesake, each film has a unique way of canvasing the issues of diversity immigrants face on their quest for the American Dream.
The United States is known as the “land of the free” attracting many immigrants to achieve the “American Dream” with the promise of equal opportunity for all. However, many groups, whose identities differed from the dominant American ideology, discovered this “American dream” to be a fantasy. In the 1960s, movements for civil rights in the United States of America included efforts to end private and public acts of racial discrimination against groups of disadvantaged people. Despite the efforts made to empower the disadvantaged groups, racialization and class differences prevailed leading to social inequality. The novel My Beloved World is an autobiography written by Sonia Sotomayor illustrating her early life, education, and career path, explaining the unresolved contradictions of American history and how they continue on in society. Prejudice against certain socioeconomic classes and races prevented equal opportunity. Sotomayor’s text explicates the racialization and class differences that many Puerto Ricans experience while pursuing a higher education, revealing the contradictions between the American promise of equal opportunity and discrimination against Puerto Ricans.
The impact of these biases is shown through the author’s own experiences as he progressed through his life. His stories evoke a sense of pity enough, because we realize that because of discriminatory actions against foreign races in America, they feel as though they live in a hostile environment. For instance, when Staples went to a jewelry store, the proprietor “stood, the dog extended toward [him], silent to [his] questions, her eyes nearly bulging out of her head.” This shows how the woman made an unfounded
Living in a collectivist, Filipino household, I am one of many Filipinos that are a part of an extended family household. As mentioned earlier, I currently live with my maternal grandparents who have heavily influenced my development. Contrastingly other extended family members such as my paternal grandparents (along with my paternal cousins) live across the country in Virginia. Because of this, they played little to no role in my development when compared to my maternal grandparents. Much of the remainder of my family lives in the Philippines, many of whom I have never met. They may have not played a significant role in my development either. The collectivist culture of the Philippines though has somewhat offset this. Collectivist refers to the emphasis of an entire group over that of the individual (Welsh, 2012) which may attribute to the closeness Filipinos have to other Filipinos whether they are family or not. In our culture, we refer to everyone as uncles, aunties, or cousins, emphasizing the closeness we feel to one another. This closeness is also mentioned within the book as a characteristic of a collectivist culture (Welsh,