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Anibal Quijano's Leave Your Name At The Border

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In Anibal Quijano’s “Coloniality of Power”, it is argued that the globalization of the world along with the idea of World Capitalism began through a process of social classifications through the division of race beginning in the colonial days. In Manuel Muñoz’s “Leave Your Name at the Border”, it is claimed through personal experience that immigrants coming into the United States are unfairly forced to immediately conform to American society. This is shown through the idea that they are forced to “Americanize” their names upon coming here and that they must leave their old cultural names behind. While both of these are similar in the idea that other cultures are unfairly treated and discriminated against, they differ in the way that they present …show more content…

Quijano chooses to discuss the origins of these racial classifications and attempts to identify how a large concept of colonization has created these racial structures, “The idea of race, in its modern meaning, does not have a known history before the colonization of America. Perhaps it originated in reference to the phenotypic differences between conquerors and conquered”. Colonization brought upon these racial, social, and labor structures. The conquerors became the Capital, and while the Capital keeps rising and rising, the laborers remain with the same if not worse in terms of living conditions and wages. Muñoz chooses to pick one specific example to elaborate the overall issue of race rather than identifying the entire picture, “Something as simple as saying our names "in English" was our unwittingly complicit gesture of trying to blend in”. Muñoz focuses on being forced to have a name changed to an “English” version in order to exemplify how deep rooted of an issue the racial and cultural division truly is. This serves to bring light to just how high the level of discrimination and superiority is in the United States. While both Quijano and Muñoz highlight the division of race and social class, Quijano does so in a broad and elaborate manner while Muñoz uses a small example to exemplify just how great the issue

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