I sat in that corner feeling voiceless, invisible, and deeply ashamed of being a Spanish speaker.
It is incredibly saddening reading what people have had to go through moving to the US and not speaking English, especially children. I grew up with a few people in my elementary school classes who didn't speak english, but I was never fully able to understand how hard everything must have been for them.
In high school she struggled in the adolescent competition for boyrfiends in a world of football games and proms, a world where her looks were plainly uncommon.
It's very unfortunate and difficult to have an uncommon complexion from other people that you're around. I feel like I've been able to relate to this during some points in my childhood, since I would become very dark in the summer and come back to school a couple shades darker, but the people around me would only be redder than they were before.
"You'll end up looking just like them."
Super saddening to hear the mother being fearful that her son will become associated with marginalized groups because he is tanning in the sun.
While I listened to the words of the poets, the alligators slumbered powerless in their lairs. The language of poetry was the magic that could liberate me from myself, transform me into another person, transport me to places far away.
I find the imagery being written super interesting. I also find it interesting that the speaker has experienced so many stressful and fear inducing situations but still manages to find comfort and happiness in writing.
When strangers and outsiders questioned me I felt the hang-rope tighten around my neck and the trapdoor creak beneath my feet.
He feels super unsafe in his day to day life, which must be such a scary and miserable way to have to live.
I was seventeen.
I feel like adding the age at the end of the paragraph is was a great way to add a shock factor. We just learned that the speaker endured all this difficult work at his job at the hospital, and then we find out he was only seventeen. Many people in their 20s would not be able to stomach a job like that.
The fear dripped off our skin and the blood dripped off our scrapesand they mixed with the river water,right here.
I like these poems where imagery and themes of family are described through nature.
When I walk throughthe desert, I wear his shirt. The gaze of the moon stitches the buttons of his shirt to my skin.
I love the personification and imagery of this line. It's clear that his father probably has a different way of viewing life than the speaker, but that doesn't stop the father nor the speaker from caring about the other. This poem reminds me of the Rule Maker short story that we read.
I too have walked my barrio streets,
The speaker lives in Barrio if that's a place I'm assuming? It has a lot of sights and things that appeal to the sense, which make it very easy and nostalgic to remember.
Listen to inside voices. You mothers know about the baby in a family, right?
Are the voices representing the speaker's children? Or the future children of anyone who reads?
I, a pious Aztec mother doing my own housework, am now on a pedestal, “She of the Serpent Skirt,”
She's saying be careful for wishing for fame, because it oftentimes backfires and doesn't go the way people originally expect.
My mother roared like the ocean,“No. No. It’s their beach.It’s their beach.”
Very powerful ending. Even though it's their home, Mexico (where I'm assuming they are) has becoming a place for tourists from the United States to come. It's almost like they feel as if they need to save part of it for the tourists.
Still (though it sounds bad) I’d give my life
Someone doesn't need to pledge their full loyalty to a country to see it as a home and put their life on the line for it.
reminds me of a woman looking directly at a man (and he doesn’t like it) of a woman fighting with her kids (but they need it)
Conveying that strong women are perceived as bitches.
we all come from the same rockwe all come from the same rockignoring the fact that we bendat different temperaturesthat each of us is malleableup to a point.Yes, fusion is possiblebut only if things get hot enough –
I like this stream of sentences, because it relates to both the welding and our world. The "rock" refers to earth, and the "fusion" of the metal is referring to the fusion of people from different ethnicities coming together and finding love.
No magic here.Only the heat of my desire to fusewhat I already knowexists.
The speaker's passion is derived from their effort to create something; They like it because it's not easy.
Maybe he didn’t want to be a better person? But if he didn’t want to be a better person, then why would he want me to be a better person?
The father clearly wants his son to have a good future and maybe not end up like him. He sets up so many rules for his son that he would personally never follow. It's kind of sweet to think about how much the father cares, even through his stern front.
Maximiliano McDonald. I liked Gonzalez better.
Sad because everything he was once familiar with has changed so suddenly.
If she didn’t want me, then I didn’t want her either.
Such a powerful line that parallels to the statement about the rich not caring about poor people problems and the poor not caring about rich people problems.
But when I’d come home, I was alone. I hated that.
The tone completely shifts when the speaker is appreciating his friends and when he's home. He's very young and has no idea how to feel or process his home situation, but he knows it's not good.
But El Paso wasn’t Juárez and it wasn’t mine and I always felt that I was just a visitor there.
It's difficult to see anywhere else as a home when we've been in one place all our life.
I didn’t grow up like you—I wasn’t used to their omnipresence, to the constant questioning of my citizenship.
The speaker is dealing with the feelings that their love has had to deal with their entire life: the questioning of their existence, but the speaker understands and feels like they have no right to feel this way due to their privilege.
the endless horizons and the wind and the heat
This long run on sentence is a great way to describe the endless number of beauties that are in the place they are describing: the Rio Grande.
That it was the woman who was supposed to follow her husband. But that never mattered to me.
By just the first paragraph, I can already see that they live in a society that believes in more patriarchal traditional ideals. And my first impression is that the speaker is male.
La Raza!Méjicano! Español! Latino! Hispano! Chicano!or whatever I call myself, I look the same I feel the same I cry and sing the same.
I never thought about how many different ways there are to address Mexican-American people. With so many labels, it makes me wonder if there are specific differences or connotations to them. Despite this, the speaker feels connected to all these labels.
I am the masses of my people and I refuse to be absorbed. I am Joaquín.The odds are greatbut my spirit is strong, my faith unbreakable, my blood is pure.
I like the confident and powerful tone at the end of the poem. He has a great understanding of his culture and what it means to him. He is willing to fight for it until the end. Even against odds, his "blood" is still "pure".
I am Joaquín. I must fight and win this struggle for my sons, and they must known from me who I am.
He wants people to be fighting and advocating for the Mexican-American people, but in what ways can they do so?
changed our language and plagiarized our deedsas feats of valorof their own.
The speaker is clearly angry that the kindness and teachings of Mexican Americans was taken advantage of. These people gave Americans better "skill and ingenuity", just for them to strip Mex-American people of their culture and pick and choose parts of it to take for themselves.
I sentenced him who was me.I excommunicated him, my blood.I drove him from the pulpit to leada bloody revolution for him and me. . . . I killed him.
Is he referring to Hidalgo? By "excommunicated" I think he means part of him has rejected his culture and has become more influenced by American culture. Maybe Hidalgo is a metaphor for Chicano culture as a whole.
THE GROUND WAS MINE.
I find it interesting that the phrases in all caps emphasize an angry or aggressive tone. He feels upset that he does not have the freedom that he used to feel like he had.
victory of the spirit,despite physical hunger, orto exist in the graspof American social neurosis,
To me, I feel like "victory of the spirit" would mean completely embracing his culture without fear of judgement or being held back by it. However, by doing this, he separates himself from white Americans, hence "physical hunger".