'Mericans' By Sandra Cisneros: A Comparative Analysis

Growing up isolated from your family can be hard sometimes. Especially when you want to feel your parents love and support. In the article “Only Daughter,” by Cisneros she talks about how her father would always talk about his sons but never cared to mention he had a daughter. Cisneros is persuasive in this article because she only talks about her point of view and leaves everybody else’s point of views out. She persuades her audience that she is overlooked and lonely.

In the short story Eleven by Sandra Cisneros, the author uses literary techniques to characterize Rachel. Sandra uses literary techniques; imagery, point-of-view, and repetition to characterize Rachel. Imagery was used to describe how Rachel feels in the text. The author explained how she felt in a way that people could imagine it. For example, when Rachel says “my whole head hurts like when you drink milk too fast.”

“Legal Alien” by Pat Mora is a poem that describes the life of a Mexican American girl, she was born in America but her parents are Mexican. In the poem Mora mentioned that she is “Bi-lingual, Bi-cultural, able to slip from How is life to Me estan volviendo loca” (Mora 370). She is caught between two cultures. She feels that she does not belong to any society, people from America see her in different ways “viewed by Anglos as perhaps exotic, perhaps inferior, definitely different” (Mora 370), but also Mexicans have a different opinion “ viewed by Mexicans as alien, (their eyes says “you may speak Spanish but you are not like me”)” (Mora 370). In this poem exists the cultural border, she does not fit either in America or Mexico “An American to Mexicans a Mexican to America” (Mora 370). She is confused about her culture, and has a cultural border problem.

This writing is about her time living in New York. She is a mother and belongs to a poor family. Anna lives in the slums of New York City along with many immigrants who all come from different countries. Anna’s family has experienced many cultural differences collide together to make a mixed culture. Anna herself is a Italian and lives peacefully with many different ethnic people such as Yugoslavians, Spanish people, Japanese people, and more. One example that displays how she lives along with different immigrants is by letting her children eat with them. Anna writes “My children are upstairs in the house next door, having dinner with the Ecuadorian family that lives on the top floor” (Quindlen 1). Anna letting her kids eat with a different ethnic family shows that she is fine with her kids assimilating into a different culture. Another instance of a cultural mix is shown when people buy squid. Quindlen writes, “About a third of the people in the neighborhood think of squid is calamari, about a third think of it as sushi and about a third think of it as bait” (Quindlen 1). This sentence displays that people from different countries arrive to America and share different ideologies. For instance, Japanese people will use squid for sushi. In contrast, Italians will use squid to make calamari. Only people from different ethnic backgrounds will have differing values and traditions. If only Americans lived in this

The girl in Executive order 9066 is discriminated against by her friend because she is of Japanese decent. The children in "Mericans" are discriminated against by their grandmother because she thinks the American ways are barbaric. They both are about the way that people judge others without even trying to get to know them or see what its like for them. Most people go by what others say. So if someone says that Japanese people are all enemies then that is what everyone will

“´Mericans” by Sandra Cisneros was a very straight forward literary work. The reader gets a strong sense of the setting in the first few lines of the story when Cisneros begins to use Spanish words and phrases. Just by reading the Spanish words, images, smells, and feelings come to a readers mind. For example, when I read Spanish words I think of warmth, cinnamon, and chili peppers. Also, based on the title of the text and the first few sentances I deduced that the story would be about an Americanized-Mexican family, and therefore began to think of the conflicts that could result within this family. This made me curious and drew me into the text. In the first paragraph of the story, a classic church scene is described establishing the location of the setting. As the story continues, readers get the impression that the family does not have very much money because of the way the different characters are described and because the narrator says, “We can not spend our allowance on fried cookies or Familia Burron comic books or those clear cone-shaped suckers.” These are all items that do not cost much money and therefore, readers assume that the children receive a very small allowance. Readers get an even stronger sense of the setting of the inside of the church when the author states that the grandmother “disappeared behind the heavy leather outer curtain and the dusty velvet inner”. Readers begin to understand that the narrator views the church as a gloomy, old, stale place,

For this paper, we would be considering two works of Literature, one is "What it's like to be a Black Girl" by Patricia Smith and the second one being the "Child of the Americas" by Aurora Levins Morales. Both of these poems take up the topic of racism and how it is to belong to an American society labeled as one race or the other. The paper would also see if and how the same subject of racism has been approached by the two poets in different manner and what their personal feelings are of the concerned subject.

I think that you have a really nice plan started. There are a couple things that I noticed could be improved. In your first paragraph, where you are giving the summaries, I think that you could add some more important details. I know that you have some of these at the end of your plan, but I think they would make more sense to the reader if they were in the summary section. For Malcolm X, maybe you could talk a little bit more about his learning in prison, because that is one of the main focuses of his excerpt. For Mike Rose, maybe you could add a little bit more about his thoughts on how society effects the opinion of education. Also, I like that you compared the two to Freire, however, I think that if you are going to include

My Capstone project is a set of five free-verse poems that include one of my own experiences as an Asian immigrant. Poems are a way to express and convey a thought or belief into short, original, and creative literature. In my DOC capstone, I chose to write a couple free-verse poems from different point of views and of different racial views. Using five different races, I depicted the hardships of the time in order to display a creative point of view of the minority groups in the United States. Utilizing DOC terms, there will be deep analyses of intersectionality, dominant ideology, racial formation, emergent ideologies, and residual ideologies. The main purpose of my project is to provide the true hardships many races suffer due to the emergent, dominant and residual ideologies of white supremacy, struggles of immigration, and the struggles of racial formation.

How do the arguments and perspectives in these poems reflect past and present attitudes toward immigration?

We are reading every day: newspapers, books, magazines. What make all those articles different from others? They may have different topics, different genres, or different backgrounds according to different writing styles. Even writing on the same theme, different writing styles can create different artistic conceptions. Diaz’s essay “ The Dreamer”, and Cofer’s essay “ The Cruel Country” are both talking about how their moms’ perseverances influenced them on their literary Achievements as immigrations of the United States. After reading their essays, as an immigration in the United States as well, I was attracted by their different writing styles and emotional tones deeply. I am going to analyze those two essays on their unique writing techniques and different expressing patterns.

Immigration and separation are a common subject now talked about. Many novels and newspapers use immigration as a subject in their writing. The portrayal of immigration can be very different. This is a common subject in the text “Band-Aid for 800 Children” and for “Red Umbrella”. They both portray the subject of immigration in both similar and different ways.

The War Relocation Authority was responsible for the process of interning Japanese Americans after the signing of the Executive Order 9066.The photographs that Dorothea Lange took of Manzanar are really able to depict raw human emotion and feelings. There is one picture particular by Lange that depicts elementary students working on homework in the Manzanar camp. It is worth mentioning that the kids have no equipment whatsoever besides their pen and paper. They are studying while kneeling on the floor and they use a bench as a table on the top half of the picture. The rest of the photograph is the wooden floor in which the children make contact with their knees. Even though it is not apparent by the picture, this school is entirely composed of voluntary students and teachers who are enthusiastic about education. In the picture, all five students depicted are seen to be working tediously. In spite of having no basic resources, these kids are able to fight against the racist policy that put them there by educating themselves. This picture really represents the human struggle to persevere through the most dire circumstances. Even though the kids were in the camp, they would rather allocate their time efficiently than letting it go to waste hopelessly. Here human resilience shined through the most obscure and suppressive context, an internment camp. Dorothea is telling the reader through this photograph to compare it to a normal citizens’ classroom environment. There is a huge discrepancy in the resources a White elementary kid has in an urban setting as opposed to the condition the kids face in the camp. Dorothea Lange’s photo effectively denounces the unsupported racist policy by the United States government by shining light unto a group of people that truly deserve their basic rights, including the one

Cisneros and Okita both have the same theme that cultural and skin doesn't determine if a person is an American. Both poems show that people are quick to judge people based on race and physical looks. Cisneros shows this by the reports/interviewers thinking that the Mexican kids don't know how to speak English and therefore were Mexican, not American. Okita shows this by showing the main character being discriminated since she is Japanese, even though she is an American citizen. Both are related as they talk about discrimination.

It 's not seeing their lives or hearing their stories, but instead a simple note from a Mexican woman that reminds him that these people he arrested are actual people with actual reasons for crossing into America. Although the note helps to change the cop’s opinion regarding immigrants enough to let them go free, what I feel clinches the cop’s decision is the fact that Makina is the note’s author. The officer probably didn’t expect the young Mexican woman to be literate, let alone a poet, as the reader can tell from the officer’s disconcerted expression as she is writing.