Alla Ajuera Summary

The author creates a mood of being irritating by her “…awful grandmother…” and brothers “…Alfredito and Enrique…” who are occupied playing outside as “… a B-Fifty-two bomber…” [paragraph 5] and her grandmother with a “… long, long list of relatives … names of the dead and the living into one long prayer…” [paragraph 10]. Including, the imagery provided in the short story described the character’s actions by watching her grandmother pray while she counts her grandmother’s mustache hairs. Later, an unknown lady and man start talking to her brother asking if she could take a picture, than judging by their looks, they assume they do not speak English but only

     As a young child, Rodriguez finds comfort and safety in his noisy home full of Spanish sounds. Spanish, is his family's' intimate language that comforts Rodriguez by surrounding him in a web built by the family love and security which is conveyed using

In the novel, Bless me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, a boy goes through many more experiences than any child in the hot summer days in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. He witnesses the deaths of his close friends and family. This boy expresses his emotions and grief through his dreams, only to wake up with fear and confusion in his mind. Antonio’s life is filled with dreams that foreshadow future incidents, as well as influences Antonio’s beliefs of religion and ideas of innocence.

The Happy Death of Alborada Almanza is a story designed for older Cuban women. Taking into account several years of life, giving us a view of what can be a peaceful death. What the author is trying to illustrate is an unpleasant Cuban reality that took place during the special period. The financial crisis that was happening in Cuba drove their own people to suffer, making them go to bed without any food. However, the central point of the story is Alborada Almanza. An old women who spend several years living by herself, suffering from malnutrition and living under extreme poverty. The story talks about how death came to get her, but before dying she wanted to spoil herself. Asking San Rafael Archangel to let

“Soto is the poet of the Chicano experience, but his view of that people is not hopeful. He shows their condition to be one of hard work with few rewards.” (Sullivan). Most Mexican Americans had laborious jobs. Soto’s father and grandfather both worked blue collar jobs and he thought he would be doomed to the same life. “In one of his essays, Gary Soto writes that as a child, he had imagined he would ‘marry Mexican poor, work Mexican hours, and in the end die a Mexican death, broke and in despair.’" (Lee). Here he describes Mexican life as an undesirable one. The despair he came to know as a child shows up a lot in his work as seen in his short story “Sorry, Wrong Family”. The main character, Carolina finds the world an unpleasant place to live. “The world, she realized, was a sad place when from a few feet away trash could fool someone who walked in beauty.” (Soto 41). This line from the story describes the moment where after asking for help she receives a small amount of hope, but puts herself back down rather quickly. Soto’s view of these people comes from his own experiences. “Recently, Soto attended his junior high school reunion, and he was disheartened to learn how many of his childhood friends had ended up in prison or been killed.” (Lee). The world he grew up in painted the Chicano life as a lesser one.

In the poem “Behind Grandma’s House”, Gary Soto writes about an experience he had as a young boy. He speaks of himself as being a nerdy Spanish boy who wants attention. He screams out for attention by acting out in negative ways. Most know, to bring attention to one’s self, one can acquire it by acting negatively or positively, but negative attention brings punishment. Soto obtains his grandmothers attention at the end of the poem, but he may have regretted it. Gary Soto’s “Behind Grandma’s House” is a 1952 free verse poem that uses imagery to suggest the speaker’s perspective of the story.

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the reader gets a sense of what the expectations are of Dominican men and women. Junot Díaz uses Oscar in contrast to the other male characters to present the expectations of the Dominican male. On the other hand, Díaz presents the women in the text, especially Belicia, La Inca, Lola, and Jenni, as strong characters in their own rights, but the male characters, with the exception of Oscar, have a desire to display their masculinity to maintain power over these women. It would be unfair to say that the women bring the abuse unto themselves, but rather it is their culture that makes the abuse acceptable and almost to a certain extent—expected.

As children grow up in a dysfunctional family, they experience trauma and pain from their parent’s actions, words, and attitudes. With this trauma experienced, they grew up changed; different from other children. The parent’s behavior affects them and whether they like it or not, sometimes it can influence them, and they can react against it or can repeat it. In Junot Díaz’s “Fiesta, 1980”, is presented this theme of the dysfunctional family. The author presents a story of an adolescent Latin boy called Junior, who narrates the chronicles of his dysfunctional family, a family of immigrants from the Dominican Republic driving to a party in the Bronx, New York City. “Papi had been with

The poem begins explaining to the reader the story of a Mexican American as he worked in an industrial factory at some point in his life. “In the factory I worked, in the fleck of rubber, under a press of an oven yellow with flame.” (Lines 1-3) Soto uses visual imagery to describe the color of

Rodriguez is ashamed. He is ashamed with the fact his espanol is no longer his main language. The author presents, “I grew up a victim to a

In this Chapter I feel that Anzaldua is trying to get the reader to understand the differences and atruggles amongst cultures. The clash of cultures results in mental and emotional confusion. Living inbetween more than one culture, you often get opposing messages from these cultures. Sometimes when living within the Chicana culture common white beleifs conflict with the beleifs of the Mexican culture. They both hold beleifs of the indifinous peopel and their culture. It creates a problem that the dominant cultures views and beleifs are defiant to the others. This is very wrong because it creats the problem of one being superior to the other. This especially relates to the Mexican culture and white culture. This creates the assimilation problem when one culture is not accepted or considered below another.

She sometimes sits out by the creek and remembers her father telling her “I am your father, I will never abandon you.” (Cisneros 1) She remembers this only after she is a mother and this is when she realizes “How when a man and a woman love each other, sometimes that love sours. But a parent’s love for a child, a child’s for its parents, is another thing entirely.” (Cisneros 1) Surely by now she feels her love souring. She can not understand why Juan must drink all time and why he continues to beat after he promises that he will never do it again.

One thing all human beings have in common is the struggle for self identity. Children are raised by parents or guardians who have struggled and fought for their own identities. In many cases, parents are still trying to figure it out, while raising their own children. Such is the case with the characters in Junot Diaz’s, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The theme of identity is conveyed through the characters’ Dominican culture, social standing, and in finding love. Oscar, Lola, and Yunior are three central characters in Oscar Wao, who’s Dominican cultural and familial expectations were major obstacles as they struggled to establish their identity.

Continuing in the theme of conformity; if the boys are united by their heteronomy, Cuellar’s castration, in contrast, is the source of his ostracism. His unfortunate accident is a wound that ‘time opens instead of closes’, and as the story progresses, Vargas Llosa juxtaposes the boys socially inclusive youthful pastimes of football and studying mentioned earlier in the novel with his comparatively solitary penchant for the ocean and surfing “a puro pecho o con colchón” (94) in chapter five. In this passage, his distance from the others is symbolised by the isolation of the sea; the narrator says the water “se lo tragó” (95) and later, the boys state that “se perdió” (96). Clearly, Cuellar’s failure to partake in the testosterone fuelled rituals of sexual maturity in the city has seen him shunned from the rest of the boys and resigned to hanging out with “rosquetes, cafichos y pichicateros” (96) instead – the modern, metropolitan outcasts. Evidently, Cuellar is incapacitated by this highly heteronormative lifestyle, as the inherent masculinity of the city is a fixed identity that will perpetually exclude him, or anyone else who cannot fulfil Peruvian societies idea of gender appropriate behaviour.

Lope de Vega’s play touches upon several key components and ideas that were brought up in many of the other stories read throughout the semester. This included the role of gender and how men and women are viewed differently in the Spaniard town of Fuenteovejuna. Another topic included the importance of family, love, and relationships and their connection on loyalty, trust, and personal beliefs. The last major influence found in other literature and in Fuenteovejuna, were the political and religious references made throughout the play. Even though Lope de Vega didn’t make these views obvious, the reader could still pick up on their connotation and the references made towards these specific ideas. With all of this in mind, each of these