Elena and the speaker of Dothead both share commonalities of feeling alone due to them having cultural differences in society. Both Elena and the Dothead are made fun of for things they cannot control about themselves. For Elena it is being made fun of for growing up in Mexico and Spanish being her native language not English, Elena being embarrassed by “the laughter of my children, the grocer, the mailman” sees it. Elena couldn’t control having Spanish as her first language, and no one was empathizing with her learning curve of trying to learn English. For the speaker of Dothead, it was people were making fun of his culture. One day while the speaker was at lunch with his friends, one friend named Nick started asking questions about wearing …show more content…
The ignorance being that if English isn’t your native language, then you cannot learn the language fluently, which is false. The speaker of Dothead shows us at the end of the poem how proud s/he is of having Indian culture. As the friends of the speaker are laughing about making fun of the red dot the speaker asks Nick for a ketchup packet and proceeds to put a red dot on his/hers forehead. This stuns the friend group of how bold the speaker is, and the speaker describes the friends being shocked as “my third eye burned those schoolboys in their seats, their flesh in little puddles underneath, pale pools where Nataraja cooled his feet”. By tying in the Hindu god of Shiva through this struggle it shows the reader that the speaker isn’t embarrassed by being Indian. The speaker of Dothead rises above cultural ignorance by exemplifying that you may make fun of my culture all you want, but I’m proud of who I