Valtierra Family Research Paper

Esperanza is the protagonist of the story. She is very wealthy and gets everything she wants. She struggles through her father’s death and moving to California. Throughout the story she becomes very mature, determined, and a hard worker. She really shocked me because she was a very spoiled princess who became a very strong migrant worker. Ramona Ortega also known as Mama is Esperanza’s mother. They are always together and she helped Esperanza stay strong. Throughout the story she is very strong but becomes very ill and depressed. Miguel was Esperanza’s best friends when they were little kids. He is the child of two servants that work for the family. He wants to become a mechanic and is very determined to reach that goal. They still look after eachother, even though they aren’t very close due to their social status. In the end he is able to bring back Abuelita back from Mexico. Hortensia was a servant that took care of their family. She always looked after Esperanza and was almost like a second mother. She was a Zapotec Indian. She was Alfonso’s wife and the mother of Miguel. Alfonso was a field worker and a very close friend to Papa. He loved the land and took care of the rose garden. He is the main person who helped everyone get to California. Isabel is the daughter of Juan and Josefina. She is only 9 years old but can clean, do laundry, and change diapers. She was the one who taught Esperanza how to do housework. She becomes very close friends with Esperanza. Isabel is the only one who goes to school to learn to read, write, and speak

Tamales have the power of merging family. Christmas eve in Mexico means interacting and bonding with the whole family. When the holiday season begins and everybody gathers at Grandmother’s house you can trace the smell of tamales getting cook in the kitchen mixed with the smell of cinnamon. The Christmas tree is bursting with presents and on the side the nativity scene which is always present in a Catholic Mexican family. The table is brimming in flavors, with a variety of dessert and snacks and delicious hot drinks. As appetizing as the table looks the whole family is barely touching the food because the tamales are almost ready and everybody wants to eat as many tamales as possible. When the tamales are ready it means that Christmas Eve celebration is staring. Everyone from the oldest in the house to the youngest gets a plate and eats as many tamales as possible while sharing stories and laughs. The tamales are the main guest of the celebration. The tamales are a traditional Mexican food that can be traced to the Aztecs. The word tamale comes from the Aztec word tamalii which means wrapped food. The Aztec women would cook the tamales for the soldiers because they were easy to carry and eat. Today making tamales is a bonding event for all the women in the family,

My grandmother was born in Guatemala into a struggling family of seven. In Guatemala, kids are often forced to leave school and start working to help provide for their family´s food and shelter. Similarly, my grandmother was not able to complete her education. Instead, she had to take care of her siblings, providing for their basic needs. As she grew up, she had three kids, including my father, and needed to find a way to give them a better life.

Although José had two children with a previous wife, Felipe was the first of six with Virginia. Later on in his life, his siblings, María, Mateo, Jesús, Juan, and Virginia, came about. José worked as a carpenter and blacksmith. With the skills of his job, he built the Alou four-room household. On top of that, he also built many of the other houses in the neighborhood. To suit his family’s desperation for money, he became a fisherman to provide for his family. He did this, so his family could be less dependant on his neighbor’s to pay for their bills. He had always been an avid fisherman because he

Rose Mary never liked the idea of working and only landed a job as a teacher in a school in Battle Mountain but she quit because of her own selfish reasons. She didn’t really care for her children, she only worried about herself and all she wanted to do was paint. Most of the time, they couldn't earn enough money to pay rent and they did the ‘skedaddle’ to run away from bill collectors. The Walls family lived in more than 10 houses because they couldn’t pay rent and sometimes they were homeless, sleeping in the Arizona deserts and

When Maria was 14 her family decided for them to have a better life then they should come to America. He wanted his children and their children to have more opportunities than he did. So their brothers and sisters ended up getting their legal papers in Mexico, and then drove across the boarder for a long trip to Stockton, California. Her father stayed in Guadalajara to manage the family business with her oldest sister Sophia, named after her mother. That summer Maria and her brothers and sisters started working in the fields in Stockton. Maria’s job was packing fruit like apricots, peaches, strawberries and all other types of fruits and vegetables. She also did a lot of the harvesting at Beacon’s Island.

After papa died, Mama, Esperanza, Abuelita were in shock. They lived without saying any word or talking until they ran out of money for livestock.Then soon, Hortensia, Miguel, and Alfonso decided to move to urban areas to get a job to live. Since Esperanza and Mama´s bank money was empty, they couldn't pay them for servants. They greeted them goodbye, hugged and told them that they would be back in couple of years. Then the next day, Mama thought we wouldn't obviously survive without money. So on Saturday, she went out with Abuelita to look out for a job near Él Rancho, in the late night when Esperanza was sleeping.When the sun was shining in Esperanza's eyes, she woke up with the birds chirping, chickens crying, but especially Mama

They lived in San Pedro street which was located in San Antonio, Texas. It was the wealthiest class of the Mexican colony. It was considered the “high society” which was made up of persons of the working class. After five years the family started to talk English and the exceptions were from the Father and Mother. Manuel Gamio judgest the family saying that they are white because of their grandparents ethnicity of the father were French and the mother was

In the detailed story of an impoverished family during the late 1900’s, Jeannette Walls describes her experience from the young age of 3, up until adulthood. The family of 6, with Rex Walls as the father, Rose Mary as the mother, and her three siblings, Lori, Brian and Maureen, were constantly moving throughout the country with little to no food or cash. The memoir shows how dysfunctional the family was, but never seemed to force the reader to condemn the parents. In a life of poverty, the have to move for own to town, and often lived in various mining towns. Although they each found something they learned to love (like Jeannette’s rock collection) in the desert, they had to leave them behind once Rex’s alcoholism only worsened, and they ran

When Alma and her family move to America, they begin their new life in a place that is strange and confusing, one that is unaccommodating, and causes Alma’s misery and guilt to almost overwhelm her. After the Rivera’s first day in America, they find their appartment and try to go to sleep. Arturo and her daughter Maribel fall asleep right away, but Alma lays awake in bed, wondering to herself if they ”had... done the right thing, coming here?” (6). In the morning, they wake up, confused, “bewildered, and disorientated, glancing at one another, darting [their] gazes from wall to wall. And then we remembered. Delaware. Over three thousand kilometers from our home in Pátzuco. Three thousand kilometers and a world away” (6). Alma and Arturo left their home, not because they wanted to come to America, but because they wanted to be able to help their daughter, Maribel. She had an accident that caused a traumatic brain injury, and Alma feels that the accident is her fault, and has been consumed with grief ever since. Although the Riveras came to America to help Maribel, Alma still wonders to herself if it was the

Maria Isabel Trevino was born on January 31, 1976 in Los Aldamas, Nuevo Leon: she lived here for two months subsequent to when she was born. One day her dad, Benito Resendez, and mom, Andrea Resendez, and her older brother, Abel Resendez, crossed her in the car illegally because they needed to go to California to work in the fields and the process for her citizenship had just begun and there

In Julia Alvarez’s fictional book, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, she tells the story of four sisters immigrating to America. Their story is told in reverse chronological order; starting when they are adults, and ending when they are children. The four girls are born into a privileged household in the Dominican Republic. While they are young, they must flee to the United States when their father gets himself into trouble. When the family comes to America in 1960, they struggle to adapt to the new culture.

Mama got sick from a pretty bad dust storm they said they couldn’t save people from it because they couldn’t see. Once that was over with Esperanza knew she had to find a way to support her family and pay bills. On page 166 it says, “I could work in the fields or in the sheds and Melina and Irene have already offered to watch Pepe and Lupe.” She dealt with the challenge by copying every aspect of everything that the rest of the workers did so that she too could fit in and actually work correctly. On page 169 it says, Esperanza copied everything that Hortensia and Josefina did. When the women put the hot bricks between their feet to keep them warm while they worked, so did

When asked about the meaning of food, Estella and Betty both associated it with family gatherings, holidays, and celebrations wherein food brings people together. They celebrate Christmas, Quinceneras (when a girl is considered a young woman on her 15TH birthday), and weddings. Most of their meals include beans, rice, and either corn or flour tortillas. Tamales are commonly served during their celebrations because they have been their traditional food for

To begin, Esmerelda Santiago and her family immigrated into the United States from Puerto Rico. Immigration means, the movement of persons into a non-native country. At this point in time the family only consisted of Esmerelda, her seven younger siblings, Mami, Tata, Tío Chico, and Don Julio. After moving around from apartment to apartment, they finally settled down in Brooklyn, New York. Esmerelda explains that they came to Brooklyn, “in search of medical care for my youngest brother, Raymond, whose toes were nearly severed by a bike chain” (Santiago 1998: 3). Mami hoped for better medical attention for her child than she would have received in Macún, Puerto Rico. Esmerelda also describes the apartment they currently lived in on McKibbin Street, in New York as, “more substantial that any of our houses in Puerto Rico” (Santiago 1998: 6). This shows her level of living back in Puerto Rico was a worse living