Rebecca Norris CCS 100/Section 1 Del Castillo Spring 2016 Final Essay Exam Luis H. Román Garcia, the author of the essay “In Search of My Queer Aztlán” shares his journey through life as a queer Chicano man and what that means of his self-identity. Along with this personal view of himself, Román Garcia postulates on the position in which these identities fit into the sociopolitical outside world beyond his own self-perception.
Furthermore, it explores the cultural hybridity of the Chicanos and the need to create a new uniting identity (Anzaldúa 77-83). The book
All three of these works examine the word “trespass” through three unique lenses. Morris Louis, Julia Alvarez, and Junot Diaz’s goal is to show how commonly humans tend to intrude onto unfamiliar settings, how it happens in different situations, and the importance of considering its effect on everyone. In Julia Alvarez’s novel How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, a Dominican family struggles to find what it means to fully belong to a foreign setting. The parents, Mami and Papi raise four daughters in an environment where someone’s uniqueness was never appreciated by the general population.
Anzaldúa was a Mexican American who was a well-known writer and had a major impact on the fields of queer, feminist, and cultural theory. Her most famous work is Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza which includes poems, essays, and short stories. Anzaldúa was no stranger to the use of literary theories in her writing, which is evident in her short story “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” Here, the author uses a combination of feminist, reader-response, and psychoanalytic theory to show the struggle of being oneself when they’re Mexican-American. Through the use of feminist theory, she explains how a female is labeled as an “habladora” when she tries to voice out her opinion about something; reader-response theory provides the reader with an understanding of the struggles of self-identity, which they are able to relate to, especially Mexican-Americans; and lastly, psychoanalytic theory illuminates on her childhood experiences, which could explain why Anzaldúa believes in what she does, such as the idea that Anglo people have tried to tame her tongue—in other words, her language.
One of the social issues in the film El Norte is losing one’s identity. The identity of Rosa and Enrique were continuously challenged by their community. Rosa and Enrique had to give up their identity as they migrate to El Norte for the purpose of safety and security. At El Norte, both Rosa and Enrique adapted new values deemed appropriate and essential in their new community. Their effort to adapt new values is highlighted, especially when Enrique had to choose between working out of states or staying with Rosa.
Those fortunate enough to live amongst these hierarchy races, foreigners, struggle in finding a belonging. Factors along the lines of crime, broken families, and poverty have made displacement a real label for those who are legally denied of permanent
Within each book, it questions the message of “culture and gender” (Louelí, “An Interpretive Assessment of Chicano Literature and Criticism”). Clearly, positive figures influenced how the Chicano community acted then and now. Rudolfo Anaya and other Chicano writers
This novel reveals that culture and language has a lot to do with forming one's identity. The type of culture and language a person has been surrounded with affects their sense of identity,
Rodolfo Corky Gonzales wrote a poem on the Chicano identity in 1967 called “I am Joaquim” which was focused on the male experience 7. It included Chicano folk heroes, historical figures and religious icons and the poem continues to be a central expression of the Chicano identity with its message of hope. It pushes to stand proud and continue to resist the assimilation process and conformity with the Anglo American culture. Despite the poem’s centrality to the Chicanx movement, like the Chicano Civil Rights Movement was largely a male expression of Chicanx history, culture and activism. This poem, however, neglects the vital roles and contributions women held and neglects the Chicana mythology in the arts, community and historical resistance 8.
Immigration during the 20th century led to to differences and cultural changes in the country spreading diversity. Immigrants have came to this country escaping the government from their country, looking for comfort,or chances and hope for their family. The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica written by Judith Ortiz Cofer, demonstrates the struggle of how immigrants wanted comfort the feeling of being accepted even as they speak a different language. The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica captures the struggle of immigrants as they were embedded into a new life a new culture. Take The Tortillas out of your poetry written by Rudolfo Anaya demonstrated how the poets that tried to add their culture into their poetry were rejected for having a different language.
The poem “To live in the Borderlands Means you” by Gloria Anzaldua, describes from the author’s personal experience how society can affect an individual’s identity. The mixture of different cultures and races can isolate a person because it affects his or her identity in culture, society and how politics affects them. To live in a society zone that creates isolation because of race, culture and other background creates not only political problems, but it also
Introduction The concept of identity has been a notion of significant interest not just to sociologists and psychologists, but also to individuals found in a social context of perpetually trying to define themselves. Often times, identities are given to individuals based on their social status within a certain community, after the assessment of predominant characteristics that said individual has. However, within the context of an ethnicity, the concept identity is most probably applied to all members of the ethnical group, and not just one individual. When there is one identity designated for the entire group, often times the factor of “individuality” loses its significance, especially when referring to the relationship between the ethnic
At the heart of a person‘s life lies the struggle to define his self, to make sense of who he is? Diaspora represents the settling as well as unsettling process. While redesigning the geopolitical boundaries, cultural patterns, it has also reshaped the identities of the immigrants with new challenges confronting the immigrant in negotiating his identity. Diaspora becomes a site where past is given a new meaning and is preserved out of intense nostalgia and longing. The novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid is significant in its treatment of the issues faced by immigrants in the diaspora.
Recurrent racism, its social impacts, is a central theme of immigrant writing that creates many landscapes in contemporary literature. The immigrant writer takes an opportunity to attack and tackle racism and its consequence from different angles – religious, cultural and historical. The writer does not randomly preoccupy with and write about her/his intricate experience in the new land, but explicitly unfold his/her race/gender experience with its ups and downs. This type of writing has created a new understanding of theories such as racism/gender/ethnic/counter-narrative and post colonial studies among many others. This alternative genre is maneuvered by political, psychological, social and cultural processes of power that is influential to its construction.
Baldwin discusses that this ongoing change in identity shows that self is an idea, and if someone needs to explore his self it needs to have an interaction with the outer world (2004: 224). From past ten years, many researchers/scholars working in different field of political science, arts, humanities, literature, political science, comparative politics and psychology are taking keen interest in identity. In nationalistic identity plays a vital role (Smith
