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Intoccia Soto's Mission Tire Palm

1649 Words7 Pages

Throughout his writing career, Soto has written eleven poetry collections for adults and has been awarded both the Bess Hokin Prize and the Levinson Award. He is a recipient of the Tomas Rivera Prize and has earned awards from the PEN Center and National Education Association. His works have been critiqued and praised on numerous occasions, and he was named NBC’s Person-of-the-Week in 1997 for his advocacy for reading. However, as a young boy, Soto never expected any of this. It was in college when one book of poetry would change his life forever. Born in Fresno, California on April 12, 1952, he was the son of two working class parents, who, in many instances, had a difficult time finding work. As a young boy living in the barrios of Fresno, the Spanish word for neighborhood, he did not excel in school and with the lack of books and …show more content…

He does so in “Mission Tire Factory, 1969,” and “Mexican Begin Jogging,” since they both focus on the tire factory he worked in as high school student. Aspects of blue Intoccia 3 collar work are also in Soto’s poem “A Red Palm,” in which McFarland believes Soto references his father. In addition, McFarland also says these three poems remind the reader of both parental sacrifice and the irksome jobs parents undertake to ensure their children a better life. He states, “With the poems of Laux and Soto we are reminded of the traditional parental sacrifice: the hard and often unpleasant jobs the parents undertake in order to assure that their children will have it easier” (331). This shows how McFarland believes Soto’s use of blue collar poems and a reference to his father in “A Red Palm,” help remind the reader of the sacrifices parents make for their kids. While numerous poems of Soto spring from depictions of working-class characters, a countless number of his poems are also extracted from observations of daily life. This is

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