Analysis Of Mexicans Begin Digging By Gary Soto

Gary Soto, born in 1952, is a Mexican American and California-born author and poet. Soto was born and raised in a working-class community in Fresno, California. His parents worked in the agricultural industry. Like his parents, he came into this field of work at a young age. At the age of five, his father died in an accident at his job, leaving his mother to be the main caretaker of his siblings and him. He went on to California State University at Fresno and started to study Geology. He had never found interest in writing, as he grew up in a household that never read. After taking a class and having discovered poetry, he rose against his set standards of life and became a writer and poet. After all the many years and works he has published,

As a Mexican American in a working-class life, culture is a massive influence not only on his writing but his overall life. As stated in his biography on the official Scholastic website, “A lot of my work seems autobiographical, because I write a lot about growing up as a Mexican American. It's important to me to create and share new stories about my heritage. It’s a huge part of my life”. An example of this influence in his writing can be found in the poem “Mexicans Begin Jogging”. In this poem, he tells the story of a day in the factory where he worked in. As stated, “At the factory I worked…my boss waved for us to run / ‘Over the fence, Soto’ he shouted, / And I shouted that I was American” (1-7). He tells the story of a time when the border patrol came to the factory he worked at and the boss urged all his workers, which he thinks are all immigrants, to run away. This poem shows us a day in his life as a factory worker and gives us a glimpse of the cultural side of the working-class that he lived in, like in some of his other poems. Moreover, culture is not the only most important factor in Soto’s writing

A particular poet that had an immense influence on Soto was Philip Levine. Soto attended Levine’s class and was introduced to poetry by Levine. As stated in the anthology “Literature and Its Writers”, “…Levine turned his interest to literature and writing” (Charters and Charters 1000). This alone is a good reason to view Levine as an influence on Soto’s writing. Levine was Soto’s guide into this path that would change his life forever. Like Soto, Levine also worked at factories at a young age and wrote about the working-class (Berliner). Furthermore, Soto’s works have a level of comparison to other poets. For example, Sylvia Plath, which poems like “Morning Song”, about her father who died when she was young (Charters and Charters 991). Like Soto, Sylvia Plath wrote in an autobiographical way. It’s not specified anywhere if she had any influence on his writing, but this autobiographical style of writing is what connects both