Everyday Use By Alice Walker Analysis

There are many things that effect our perception, but the most prominent is our culture. Culture effects our perception of people and the world is various ways, and these ways are all very prominent in the texts “Everyday Use”(Alice Walker), “Legal Alien”(Pat Mora), and “Where worlds collide”(Pico Lyer). Everyday use contains many examples about how they difference in a mother, and 2 sisters culture has influenced their perception. The very first paragraph of the story says “A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like and extended living room.”(Page 58) In the story this is meant to give more information about the family and their culture. This serves to show us that the mother’s perspective

On page 59 she mentions TV shows where it shows parents congratulating their very successful child, and how Dee (her daughter) has become successful, but the reality of it doesn’t really meet her standards. Dee grew up in the same household as her sister and her mother but had different experiences, goals, and ideas of what was the correct way to grow up. This caused her to have very different feelings about her families’ culture and to grow into her own. She doesn’t like the idea of actively living like the rest of her family had for years, but she wants to be able to choose what aspects of it to take with her. Her culture, to her, is more of something to show off than to live in. This causes disparities between her and her family, with the most notable one being about a quilt. Her mother had been planning on giving a few handmade quilts to Maggie, but Dee really wanted them, in order to hang them, instead of use them (page 63). When offered some quilts that weren’t handmade instead, Dee got upset, and insisted on having the handmade ones. She claimed that she deserved the quilts rather than Maggie, as she could appreciate them better

“10 Viewed by Anglos as perhaps exotic/perhaps inferior, definitely different” (lines 9 and 10). These lines are used to show how the person feels about White Americans. They’re Mexican and therefor they are not treated the same as white people in America. However, they don’t feel like the belong with people who were born in Mexico either (lines 12-14), causing a defined sense of distance between people of the cultures they’re apart of, causing a unfixable distance between them. This has directly affected the authors view on many things, and most likely caused them much stress when they were younger. This is heavily implied by lines 16-22, “a handy token/sliding back and forth/between the fringes of both worlds/by smiling/by masking the discomfort/of being pre-judged/bi-laterally.” Being a part of 2 or more cultures causes major differences in the way that person experiences those cultures. This majorly affects the way they feel about people and the world. While the author can speak both Spanish and English, and experience the benefits of being a part of both cultures, they will never really be treated the same as a person who’s solely part of Mexican culture or American culture. Because of this, they feel as though they are constantly being judged, or seen as less than people a part of only one culture. This also leads to them feeling like they have to hide