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By Any Other Name By Pat Mora

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In our world, cultural identity is the glue that holds us all together; it provides a feeling of importance and understanding that we all need in our daily lives. But this support and positive attitude that often comes with identity can be reversed by people who use these cultural identities to generalize and oppress groups of people as shown in these two pieces of literature. “Immigrants”, by Pat Mora, is a poem that tells the story of multicultural parents that bring their children to the U.S. in the hopes that they will become proper Americans so they will be accepted.. The other piece, “By Any Other Name”, is a memoir by Santha Rama Rau and also follows a similar story about two sisters being oppressed while attending school in British-controlled India. Both “By Any Other Name” and “Immigrants” reflect each other by portraying children growing up in a prejudiced environment, but also have their differences in the unique situations that led the subjects here. …show more content…

In Rau’s memoir, her and her sister are just beginning school and their teacher decides, “Suppose we give you pretty English names,” (1). This is just the beginning of demonstrating how the British are attempting to mold and change Indian culture to fit their own needs in the story. Similarly, in Mora’s poem, the parents want to “Name [their kids] Bill and Daisey, / Buy them blonde dolls that blink blue” (3, 4). And now, as also seen in “By Any Other Name”, children are being influenced into shifting their cultural views and identities to fit into the stereotypical framework of other groups and

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