Acclaimed novelist, poet, and essayist Leslie Marmon Silko is known for her lyric treatment of Native American subjects. Silko was born in Albuquerque New Mexico, and received her bachelor’s degree from the University of New Mexico. She’s is a mixed Laguna Pueblo, white, and Mexican ancestry, grew up on the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico. As a Laguna Pueblo writer and one of the key figures in the First Wave of what literary Silko wrote myths, family stories, poetry, and fiction. In her article, "The Border Patrol State" which was meant to address the problems that are experienced at the border points. Silko looks at the border authorities as those that have been deliberately constituted to violate the rights of the Native Americans …show more content…
Silko’s article is filled with much emotion as she experiences the Border Patrol for the first time and in incorporating other people’s stories as well as her own, pathos is established in different ways. As Silko traveled passed the border patrols on her journey, she creates pathos in many different scenes and emotions that were happening during her situation as well as in others’. The night Silko and her friend were travelling across the highway and were stopped by the border patrol, she says “there was an awful feeling of menace and violence straining to break loose” (Silko, 2) as she vividly portrays the fear she was feeling at the time. The phrase “straining to break loose” just shows the tension and fear being built up between Silko and the Border Patrols. Silko compares her situation that night to a book she read a while back that was about torturing and killing random citizens in Argentina by the police and military, and she begins to imagine how convenient it would be for the border patrol officers to do the same to them. It could be so easy for the Border Patrols to just kill them and leave them on the side without anyone