Cuando Vives En La Frontera By Gloria Anzaldúa

“Yolanda” by Oscar Casares is a story narrated by a thirty-six-year-old man reflecting on his experiences during one summer in his youth. The story starts in present day before recounting the experiences of the summer he met Yolanda. She was the young wife of Frank, a controlling older husband, who moved in next door to the narrator when he was twelve years old. The narrator thinks Yolanda is beautiful and develops a huge crush on her, so he can’t help but listen to Yolanda and Frank’s fights and make-up sessions throughout the summer since their houses are so close together. His feelings for Yolanda grow when she spends time looking after him when he comes down with chickenpox. Ultimately, Frank and Yolanda have a huge fight and Yolanda

When I was a little naïve boy from a small native town, I asked my mum what would I become in the future. With much simplicity, she said: “I’m no psychic, boy!” She later adds, “It’s what you decide for the future that matters.” Truthfully, it is the same sentiment that ranged from the song “Que Sera, Sera”, by Doris Day. Although my mum is a teacher in high school, she resembled as a detective in disguise; she can thoroughly see the personality of every kid in her school, therefore, she did the screening of my friends’ list which happen in the same school.

Gloria Anzaldúa was a Texas-born, lesbian, Latina, feminist, that wrote about many of her personal experiences and views of the diverse background she grew up in. Growing up a certain culture at home and being in a country with a different culture, brings along a lot of self-identifying issues. Gloria Anzaldúa uses various strategies and languages to write this powerful piece by code-switching, quoting others, diction, and rhetorical questions. Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” speaks about the social issues that Latinos face involving identity, language, and sexism.

There are many things in life that can transform a person. Jimmy Santiago Baca’s transformation came through prison and poetry. A Place to Stand is a memoir written by Baca to depict his life-long struggles. He starts it off by explaining his bumpy childhood and rough upbringing. He goes on to explain his incarceration, the struggles he faces while in the prison, and how he learns to make the days go by quicker and stay out of trouble until the day he is free. His tough prison life is turned around when he learns to read and write poetry. Baca explains to the reader that, “Language gave me a way to keep the chaos of prison at bay and prevent it from devouring me; it allowed me to confront and understand my past, and it opened the way

Like my abuela used to say “Del arbol caido todos quieren hacer leña.” Meaning the opportunistic people try to take advantage from the misery of others. In the poem “El Sonavabitche” the woman goes to tell the grower to fill up the sewage ditch when she realizes la migra was called by the sonavabitche to not pay the workers. The woman confronts him and forces him to pay. It was satisfying how the women confronted and challenged el sonavabitche.

In Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, she uses her own personal experiences growing up and living near the border that separates the United States and Mexico. Anzaldua makes us reexamine the purpose of a border and the negative effects that come with it. Since she lives close to the border, she cannot completely identity herself as an American nor would she be able to call herself Mexican. As a Chicana, she did not know where she belonged in society. The two cultures she lived under put her in this constant state of transition. The struggles she faces strongly resembles the ones that Piri Thomas faces in his novel Down These Mean Streets. Despite the fact that Thomas was actually of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent, many people failed to recognize him as such and saw him as an African-American.

Gloria Anzaldua, an American writer, passionately displays her mixed feelings of the Spanish and American differences of culture and language through the pages of How to Tame a Wild Tongue. She consistently proves her identity through the use of Spanish language in the text, albeit the text is primarily in English. However, Anazaldua is not a Mexican citizen, she still feels so deeply connected to its’ culture. Even so she can speak English and has struggled with the barriers that arise, she continues to claim that her culture and language make up who she and the other Chicanos are and it is highly valued to them.

Border corridos revolve around the Texas-Mexico border and illustrate the effects of the The Mexican-American War. During the Mexican-American War, Mexico lost the battle and the state of Texas, which made the Rio Grande the national border. As a result, Mexicans who lived on the other side of the river had to decide between America and Mexico. The people who chose to stay in America became “Tejanos (Texan-American)”(Davis, Lecture) and their culture, language, and property were respected due to the signing of the “Treaty of Guadalupe” (Flores, 167). However as Anglo-American settlers moved into Mexican territory, a “land-grab” was institutionalized, which sold most of Mexicans’ lands for cheap prices, due to the Mexican population’s unawareness. Not only that, but Texas officers known as “Texas Rangers” discriminated and violently treated ethnic Mexicans (Davis, Lecture). The border corridors reflect the interethnic conflict between whites and Tejanos and portray the injustice during those times. Similarly, Badman Ballads portrays the oppression of one ethnic groups towards another. This ballad illustrates blacks discriminated by whites during the

"Los Venditos," which signifies "the sold out ones," is a play that was correlated by Luis Valdez and created by the Farm Workers Theater of Atzlan. They have built their theater society with respect to the old show clubs that were common in the striker 's groups of the sixties and seventies. In these groups, performing artists and performers would assume parts that would ridicule certain gatherings or people that they were opposing. Case in point, if the produce pickers were striking against a cultivator, then the play would draw out every generalization that individual put stock in or each awful quality that that individual had and would decorate it. They would make their focus out to be inept and uninformed. "Los Venditos" finishes this errand extremely well on the grounds that it demonstrates each generalization that Anglos have against Mexican Americans, and places it in a manner that will make any Anglo be embarrassed for having accepted such falsities. Everything that was put into the play was put there for a reason, whether it is a real occurrence or a typical generalization.

Every writer has the ability to make their writing remarkable, beautiful, and complex by using elements like genre, discourse, and code. Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza is a semi-autobiographical work by Gloria Anzaldúa. She examines the relations of her lands, languages, and herself overall. She defines the borders she has around herself in the preface of the book: “The actual physical borderland that I’m dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands…the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and

In the short story “Borderlands”, Anzaldua uses a technique which crafts a metaphorical meaning for the reader. Anzaldua uses a metaphor in order to express the words, put chili into the borscht, having a metaphorical meaning of the chili in the borscht because of it explaining a mexican and russian cultures combing together. It also is a reference to acculturation because it suggests the mix of two cultural traditional foods. “Chili in the borscht” (1). The line chili in the borscht is a reference to assamlination because it’s combining the mexican and russian culture; which is a reference leading to a terminal conflict. Anzaldua creates a conflict between the different races by suggesting betrayal in the quote. “To live in the borderlands

Jennifer Glaser touches on many topics in her analysis “Picturing the Transnational in Palomar: Gilbert Hernandez and the Comics of the Borderlands,” such as, sex, love, sexism, gender, violence, and much more. While these areas are all explored in some way throughout Hernandez’s stories, Glaser ties them all in by discussing how a small Central American town named Palomar views itself versus how outsiders, such as Americans view it. Glaser further explains how the stories Hernandez tells are used specifically to humanize Latinos and provide a different view and perspective into the Latin community from what is normally showed by pop culture. Hernandez not once labels Palomar as a Mexican city in an effort to allow any Latino to feel as if they can belong there. In her analysis, Glaser explains this by discussing how:

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldua is full of personal narratives detailing the visible and invisible “ borderlands “ that exist within a race, gender, sexuality, and spirituality. Her essays and poems are based on her own personal experiences as a Chicana and lesbian activist. Through her writing, she challenges the true definition of the borderlands as more than a simple line that divides different cultures. It calls for those who are oppressors to change their attitudes and show support to those of the borderlands. By writing in both English and Spanish she expresses how one language would not be enough to describe her Chicana literature.

“In the Maya civilization, a peaceful tribe is brutally attacked by warriors seeking slaves and human beings for sacrifice for their gods. Jaguar Paw hides his pregnant wife and his son in a deep hole nearby their tribe and is captured while fighting with his people. An eclipse spares his life from the sacrifice and later he has to fight to survive and save his beloved family.” Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Often, I find myself roaming the streets of my hometown, appreciating its delightful nature. What I love the most when I roam the streets is the smell of cooking enchiladas, carne asada and tortillas hechas a mano (handmade tortillas), which remind me of Mexico. Woodburn is a city with a large Latino population which makes me feel at home. In fact, many people may refer to Woodburn as “Little Mexico”.