Borderlands La Frontera Essay

Immigrants’ experience can be described as being transcultural, meaning their experiences from their country (including cultural signifiers) are translated or transported to the new country they live in. During the transcultural experience, people can be changed by the new culture, and they also bring some their own traditional culture to the new environment. In 1990s, a lot of Latinos leave their countries to come to the United States because of the civil war. Hector Tobar’s book The Tattooed soldier tells a story of a Guatemalan refugee Antonio who comes to live in Los Angeles. His wife and son were killed by the government army. Antonio has to escape from his country because he could be killed too. After the murder, the sergeant of the death squad comes to the United States too. Antonio finds the soldier in a park in Los Angeles, and he starts to plan to kill the murderer. At the end of the story, he revenges for his wife and son. In Tobar’s other book Translation Nation, Tobar interviews many Central Americans who crossed the border, and this book also records many Latino immigrants’ life experiences. Both of the books show these immigrants’ transcultural experience in the United States. In The Tattooed Soldier and Translation Nation, the Latino immigrants are changed by the new country they live in and they also bring their own culture to the new country. Their cultures change and influence each other, that’s the reason why immigrants’ experiences are

In an intense debate on solution to undocumented immigrants living in America, Journalist Jose Vargas opens with, “What do you want to do with us? And to me, the most important question, as a student of American history, is this: how do you define American?” This is but a few emotion striking moments captured in the documentary “Documented”. Washington Post reporter Jose Antonio Vargas uses his own life as a glimpse of the hardships faced by hardworking Americans who are labelled as undocumented immigrants. Feeling as if he had been living in fear for 18 years while establishing a career as a successful journalist, Vargas came out as being undocumented and began documenting his journey toward humanizing the millions of illegal immigrants who

In defining one’s identity, many different factors are considered; such as one’s nationality, characteristic, personality, ability, experience, religion, and etc. Especially for those people who live in America, so called country of immigration, has much more complicated identities than those Asian country people where mixed people are rarely noticed. Thinking about the concept of identity, some people easily categorized themselves as simple factors and terms which could describe their surface; white, black, Asian, European, pretty, ugly, nice, mean and so on and so forth. And that is the most point where majority people stopped to list their identities from exploring more in complicated range. However, there are many people who dig more than common people; one great example would be Denise Chavez, who is the author of the novel called Loving Pedro Infante, who kept asking herself about her identity to approach more accurate and clear ideas. In her work, reader could see the confusion of Tere, the main character of the novel, went through her life as Latin-American female in dealing with finding one’s true identity and how she accept her as who she really is. Denise Chavez, who is obviously Latin-American lady, mirror her own life experience through the character she created and introduce to readers about tough life she lived in America as Mejicana. The main character of this novel have a clear understanding and strong idea about herself throughout the novel, even if

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.

Social science teaches that a person’s self identity is a reflection of that which other people put on the individual, in other words a person’s behavior steams more from what they see of themselves from someone else’s perspective and less from how they see themselves. In the case of the Mexicans, this concept holds true. From that, which has been studied thus far this semester, Mexicans/ Mexican Americans are good examples of this concept. Their sorted past has resulted in a new kind of Mexican American and perhaps a new kind of Mexican. Certainly the Mexicans American’s experience in this country has brought about some changes from the first generation of Mexicans who were born in this country to those who

What defines you? Is it the many tiny, wriggling spiders that could potentially be inside your body, the experiences you might have had in Istanbul, your list of hobbies which may or may not include crochet, or is it something a bit more trivial, such as where you come from? Who are you? Take a moment to reflect on yourself. In an essay concerning the argument of identity, Richard Rodriguez forces his readers to analyze themselves, particularly during the high climb of immigration in America today, because with the rising amount of cultures and ethnicities finding a home in this country, there really is no “black and white” answer. The question of identity is the key idea in Rodriguez’s Blaxicans, further expanded upon by careful word choice,

Pentecost (2014) compares The Distance Between Us: A memoir with Rudolfo Anaya and Tomas Rivera’s major work as an attempt to capture the cultural identity of Mexican Americans concluding that the main protagonist of these works had to set outside their cultural boundaries to find their cultural identity. Ruf (2009) unlike Pentecost (2014) emphases the uniqueness of Grande’s work as she highlights that even though Across a Hundred Mountains is a fiction work it is based on Grade’s real experiences and fears. Unlike most immigration novels that are usually narrated from a male perspective, Grande’s narrative of a young girl denounces attention to gender inequalities and intersectionalities among immigrants (Bürkner, 2012) (Ruf, 2009). In addition, critics see Reyna Grande as an honest writer that uses her personal experiences for the development of an immigrant narrative and whose novel is underscored with personal truths (Olivas, 2006) (Coca, 2009). While this literature explore Grande’s work they do not pay attention to the representation of her personal and/or her fictional character Juana’s identity formation, when it is a fundamental characteristic of her

Gloria Anzaldua is among the many feminist theorists that has moved into the realm of addressing post-modern identities. In Gloria Anzaldua’s articulation of the new mestiza consciousness, she makes the argument of identities as multiple, hybrid, and more specifically created as a result of the Borderlands. However, according to Anzaldua, and despite the difficulties engendered by her very existence, the mestiza is also a figure of enormous potential, as her multiplicity allows a new kind of consciousness to emerge. This mestiza consciousness moves beyond the binary relationships and dichotomies that characterize traditional modes of thought, and seeks to build bridges between all minority communities to achieve social and political change.

What I'm going to talk about is four major themes from the book, Borderlands La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa. The four major themes I chose to talk about are first, how you shouldn’t be ashamed of yourself, then how Anzaldúa shows deviant behavior throughout the book, also, how she found herself through poetry, and lastly, America’s melting pot.

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.

Culture is an invisible bond that connects people together. The literature, art, religion, food, and language of a community represent its culture. Navigating between cultures is not something impossible to do, but there are a lot of limitations and sacrifices to make in order to blend in with other cultures. To respond about the cultural navigation issues and benefits, Manuel Munoz, the author of “Leave your Name at the Border”, talks about the importance of the non-Americans’ names, especially Mexican Americans’ names, to their identities. Munoz wants readers (Americans) to give everyone the respect they deserved as human beings, starting with accepting and using people’s real names. However, Andrew Marantz, the author of “My Summer at the

Cristina Henriquez’, The Book of Unknown Americans, folows the story of a family of immigants adjusting to their new life in the United States of America. The Rivera family finds themselves living within a comunity of other immigrants from all over South America also hoping to find a better life in a new country. This book explores the hardships and injustices each character faces while in their home country as well as withina foreign one, the United States. Themes of community, identity, globalization, and migration are prevalent throughout the book, but one that stood out most was belonging. In each chacters viewpoint, Henriquez explores their feelings of the yearning they have to belong in a community so different than the one that they are used to.

Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, shares his life-long journey as an undocumented immigrant in his text, “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.” As the title suggests, Vargas attempts to convey to his audience, who likely never has and never will experience anything similar to what he has, what it is like to live as an immigrant in the United States of America. Skillfully, Vargas details the perfect number of personal stories to reach the emotional side of his audience, which is anyone who is not an immigrant. Through the use of his personal accounts Vargas is able to effectively communicate that immigrants are humans too while simultaneously proving his credibility, as he has experience and a vast amount of knowledge

America is a place full of immigrants with no single ethnicity or race. America can also be referred to as the ?Melting Pot? because it consists ingredients of multicultural backgrounds. There are cultures such as French American, Asian American, Italian American and African American. I am Mexican American. My culture has helped me to become the writer I am today. My bicultural background and constant moving back and forth from Mexico to America has both influenced and weakened my writing. Although I was born in America, my Mexican culture has always been a part of my life. I have spent the majority of my life in Mexico, and Spanish is my first

Mexico is bordered by the United States on the north, the Pacific Ocean on the west, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea on the east, and Guatemala and Belize on the south. It is characterized by an extraordinary diversity in topography and climate and is crossed by two major mountain chains, the Sierra Madre Occidental and the Sierra Madre Oriental. The high central plateau between these two mountain ranges historically funneled most of the human population toward the center of this region. Mexico features volcanic peaks, snow-capped mountains, tropical rain forests, and internationally famous beaches. Mexico City is an enormous metropolitan area and dominates the rest of the country's culture, economy, and politics. Nearly