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Margarita Engle's Literary Analysis

451 Words2 Pages

Before becoming a full time poet and novelist margarita angle was a normal girl. Margarita grew up in Los Angeles and spent time with her extended family in Cuba during the summer (Margarita Engle).Margarita Engle raises awareness about Cuban culture and Cuban history through her literary works The Surrender Tree, The Poet Slave, and Drum Dream Girl. First The surrender Tree impacted awareness for the war between the Spanish and Cubans.The surrender tree is a book composed of poems in the perspective of people during the war. This book will create a picture of what the Cuban and Spanish war was like.“Slavery all day,and then, suddenly, by nightfall- freedom!”(The Surrender Tree Quotes).This quote shows how people at that time struggled …show more content…

The poet slave describes the life of a boy as a slave. She puts the book into many little poems describing how he was kept like a pet and shows how people were treated back then.“Now my owner is ghostly inside her skeleton of powder but I, being only a poodle, can watch I am allowed to know these truths about shadow and light”(The Poet Slave of Cuba).This quote shows how broken he was at the time. It also shows how many were treated at this time to make the reader realize just how hard times were.this book impacted the history part of Cuban past times. This book also creates awareness for the reader so we don't repeat the past. For my final text Drum Dream Girl impacted awareness of the past and how courage can pay off. In this story a little girl lives in a village where music not allowed. when the little girl has enough she uses courage and plays anyways.“On an island of music in a city of drum beats the drum dream girl dreamed.”(Drum Dream Girl).If you have background knowledge on this story this means she is sad and that she wishes the town could play music. This story is true and shows the history of Cuban culture and how courage can help a

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This shows how when one has unrestricted access to other nations how we can overlook their shortcomings even at the expense of our own morals. The book also highlights the way the American government treated the Cubans in the same way they treated their own minority population. As a result of the thought process that the Blacks were bad, that affected many policies concerning the Cuban government. It is important to note that some time after Cuba gained its independence they had a high literacy rate, low infant mortality rate, relatively high income per capita. They were one of the leading countries in Latin America although compared to America their numbers were low.

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Labor and slavery are central themes that are similar in both “Slave Girl in California” and “The Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass. However there are opposing themes such as liberty and

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Therein lies the irony of solidarity mixed with ideas of superiority, a principle that De La Fuente should have emphasized rather than glazing over as it is crucial to examining revolutionary Cuba. In the other portion of the chapter, De La Fuente continues with Batista’s Cuba, but in a different light.

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1923 Words | 8 Pages

Selena Quintanilla had once said, “Never in my dreams would I have thought that I would become this big. I am still freaking out.” Selena was one of the best Mexican-American singers that everyone had loved. (Topic Sentence) How the life began with The Queen of Tejano music. Selena was known for Queen of Tejano music, her music and fashion made her one of the most celebrated Mexican-American entertainer in the late 20th century.

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The reality of life can often differ from childhood to adulthood. Twelve-year-old Pablo Medina experienced this first hand. In the reflective essay, “Arrival: 1960,” Medina tells about his experiences of moving from Cuba to America. Upon arriving, his expectations for America are set high. Coming from the communism he saw in Cuba, Medina was expecting a land of freedom, apart from violence, and segregation; he was expecting an overall better life for himself.

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732 Words | 3 Pages

Throughout the narrative, the author includes his personal stories about experiencing the violence of slavery first-hand. For example, on page 20, he writes about the first time he witnessed a slave, his own aunt, getting the whip. “The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest…I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition… It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery…” The author including his experience of his aunts whipping, in detail, appeals to the emotions of the reader.

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950 Words | 4 Pages

But sometimes he likes to take the whip and this time he whipped her until her back was all ripped and bleeding. We had to watch”(43-44). This represents pathos to create the subject of freedom by way of showing simply come cruel they may be treated. Mothers are used for breeding but, don't even get to keep their children in the end. It’s even worst to think that Sarny as a child doesn’t realize what she has lost and thinks it not only normal but okay from children to be taken away from their parent and passed on for someone to take come on till they themselves are old enough to work and to create the theme of freedom by showing how old hearted the ‘master’ is that it is clear he enjoys the pain he causes and that he makes the other slaves watch in a way of a silent threat or promise that this could and will happen to them if they too step out of line.

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787 Words | 4 Pages

Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban is narrated through a multiplicity of voices as the characters struggle to reconcile their identities either within Cuba or as immigrants in America. These narrative accounts express the consequences of political unrest in Cuba (between 1972 and 1980) on the formation of a stable identity, as well as the consequences of such on family kinships. As such, the main themes expressed throughout the novel include displacement and distance, which are prominently reflected through the characterizations of Lourdes and Pilar, and their connection to Cuba and America. Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban, then, explores the consequences of cultural exile on shaping a stable sense of self-identity, challenging the idea

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802 Words | 4 Pages

Maya Angelou recalls the first seventeen years of her life, discussing her unsettling childhood in her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Maya and Bailey were sent from California to the segregated South to live with their grandmother, Momma. At the age of eight, Maya went to stay with her mother in St. Louis, where she was sexually abused and raped by her mother’s boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. Maya confronts these traumatic events of her childhood and explores the evolution of her own strong identity. Her individual and cultural feelings of displacement, caused by these incidents of sexual abuse, are mediated through her love for literature.

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935 Words | 4 Pages

An American Slave,” Douglass discusses the horrors of being enslaved and a fugitive slave. Through Douglass’s use of figurative language, diction and repetition he emphasizes the cruelty he experiences thus allowing readers to under-stand his feelings of happiness, fear and isolation upon escaping slavery. Figurative language allocates emotions such as excitement, dread and seclusion. As a slave you have no rights, identity or home. Escaping slavery is the only hope of establishing a sense of self and humanity.

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678 Words | 3 Pages

We would all play in the water together, there was no such thing as girls play in one side and boys in the other everything was one and the same. After an entire day at the river, just when you thought everyone was worn-out and ready for a long nap, we were all rushing to get home to play baseball. Girls and boys from the neighborhood would gather together, in a deserted field at five in the afternoon to play baseball all night long. This was the life I lived in Cuba full of joy and freedom. I was never

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1142 Words | 5 Pages

Put simply, Castro’s struggle with these people was “I couldn’t relate,” (Hungry 264). After moving off campus Castro’s struggles deepened. She lived in a barrio which most of her friends did not visit. They see trouble when they look at her neighborhood instead of the life and culture she sees there. She moved between two seemingly completely separate worlds, the manicured campus and the apartment in her barrio.

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1229 Words | 5 Pages

In Isabel Allende’s short story “Two Words”, readers follow the story of Belisa Crepuscalario, a woman who was born to an extremely poor family and sell words for a living. Colonel, a really tough and closed man who does not show his feelings easily and had spent his life serving homeland in the civil war. Late in the story she meets Colonel where the tough and closed man become a totally different person. In “Two Words,” Allende emphasizes the power of words through Belisa’s work to develop both Belisa and Colonel’s character, helping him realize that life is beautiful and enjoyable. To understand the power of words in Belisa’s life, it is important to know a little bit about her background.

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689 Words | 3 Pages

Taken For Granted It is often said to not judge a book by its cover. In the story “An Hour With Abuelo” a young teenage boy must visit his grandfather who doesn't have much time left to live at a nursing home in Brooklyn. Once his mother persuades him to go visit his grandfather he is not happy .As he arrives to his grandfather's room Arturo keeps looking at his watch timing one hour till he could go home. His grandfather tells him his life story not knowing how interested he would be into it.

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1541 Words | 7 Pages

The poem is constructed into seven stanzas, organized in iambic pentameter containing a rhythm of “ababcdcd”, throughout the rhythm of the poem comes reflection to the emotions of the speaker whom is a slave. In one stanza the slave uses his curiosity to ask god why cotton plants were made (the slaves mostly worked through picking cotton plants). “Why did all-creating nature Make the plant for which we toil? and how horrible it is for anyone to be a slave, Think, ye masters iron-hearted... How many back have smarted For the

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