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Barrio Boy

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Have you ever seen twins? Have you ever tried to tell the two apart? While the outside appearance may be consubstantial, their personalities will most likely be contradistinctive. That 's kind of how the memoirs “Barrio Boy”, by Ernesto Galarza, and “No Gumption”, by Russell Baker, are. While there are many unambiguous similarities such as their characters, P.O.V, story structure, values, and theme, they have univocal differences such as the character 's ' actual personality. If you read the book you 'd notice that the lesson the books taught is close if not exactly the same. The characters just had to take two different paths to learning the same lesson. Even though the two took completely different paths...didn 't they take the same one? As …show more content…

As you already know both stories are on the subject of two young boys trying to find out who they are. In the process, they both had to travel foreign lands. One in the figurative sense of the word and the other quite literal. Baker had to travel the foreign land of work. It was clear that he did not enjoy having to work in the business of selling. In “No Gumption”, Baker stated: “When I objected that I didn’t feel any aptitude for salesmanship, she asked how I’d like to lend her my leather belt so she could whack some sense into me. I bowed to superior will and entered journalism with a heavy heart.” In “Barrio Boy”, Galarza literally and figuratively traveled foreign lands. The story opens up with him just starting school in Sacramento, California though he is from Mexico. A part of his journey in regards to finding himself was learning a new part of him. In both stories they did something they thought was distasteful and ended up becoming successful writers behind it. In “Barrio Boy”, Galarza stated in the beginning that: “....her voice patiently maneuvering me over the awful idiocies of the English language.” In the end, though he stated: “It was easy for me to feel that becoming a proud American, as she said we should, did not mean feeling ashamed of being a Mexican.” To sum

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