Analysis Of The Book ' Missing People And Others '

When a mentor gives you lemons, you make the lemonade. In the book The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, the person most important in Bod Owens’s life is his mentor, Silas. Bod Owens did not have the average teenage life; he was raised by two dead parents who live in a graveyard, and was not allowed to leave the graveyard unless his parents gave him permission. The lady on the Grey is the symbol of death that mentors Silas, which gives her and Silas a similar “job” in their afterlife.

In Everyone Leaves by Wendy Guerra she explains her hardships and her mental and physical abuse that she has faced and learns how to use the hardships she has faced and grows from them and learned to use those hardships to become a stronger individual. This book brings you in the life of someone that's been through so much and that many people today in this world face unfortunately she writes the intimate and harsh details of her life within the pages of her Diary that became her book. The book starts in the late 1970’s a few years after Fidel Castro became president of Cuba from 1976-2008 and in the midst of her parents divorce and a country torn apart from the rest of the world because of political issues with the Cuban government and the

For example, when Anna Lisa experienced the culture shock for the first time, she felt confused because it was her first time being defined as a Latina. Also, when she described herself as a majority in El Sereno but then a minority in college, Anna Lisa felt intimidated. Anna Lisa always had others when she was at home but it changed when discovered herself. She definitely described the fear and confusion struck in her entering college. Anna Lisa also adds on how angry she felt as she would scold her mother for not teaching her Spanish as a little girl in El Sereno. In addition, Anna Lisa states that she cannot be a content Latina because she has to be a “politically-and-socially-aware-Latina-with-a-chip-on-my[her]-shoulder-because-of-how-repressed-I[she]-am-[is]-in-this-country” (Raya 121). In this statement, Anna Lisa states how many people feel because of racial stereotypes. By adding this statement, Anna Lisa states that she wants to be someone she isn’t and describes the pain of several other Latinos go through everyday for being

The essay “Being an Other” was written by Melissa Algranati. She is a graduate of the State University of New York at Birmingham and has a master’s degree from Colombia University. The reason as to why she wrote this particular essay was to discuss and describe her experiences of not fitting easily into any particular identity group. Her intended audience are those individuals who seem to have difficulties feeling part of a group. The text was originally published in Thomas Dublin’s “Becoming American, Becoming Ethnic: College Students Explore Their Roots.” Algranati’s identity crisis led her to publish this essay and more importantly show what it was like to be mistaken for another ethnic background. She goes on to make the noteworthy argument,

In a society that focuses in the creation of labels in order to categorize its members; we continue the fight to defy the social constructed barriers that daily limit the lives of the human kind to no more than what their eyes can see and their minds judge. Gender, race, ethnicity, background, beliefs, sexual preferences, skin color, language, culture, and everything else that identifies a community are constantly used to criticized it, repress it and control it. While the judging lenses of society have always been there, we have to recognize that with the growing of communities, form migration, the problem continues to aggravate. In the United States of America, the perfect cradle is found to make this baby grow. With the great amount of immigrants, it is rather easy to find problems in society related to race, gender and culture in general; whether it is in the fields related to government, justice and law, as in the field of education.

Several communities are known for having residents from a specific ethnic group. Oscar Casares delves deeper behind this topic in his essay, “Crossing the Border without Losing your Past,” where he discusses how vital it is for an individual to hold onto the roots of their ancestors as well as practicing its rich culture and traditions. Due to prominent similarities in culture, language, life style, and cuisine, many individuals from a certain race live in a community with others of their kind, hence the gathering of neighborhoods in unison. Thus, Casares states, “In my hometown, Brownsville, Tex., almost everyone I know is Mexicano: neighbors, teachers, principals, … rich and poor, short and tall, fat and

Landa, personal communication, March 1 2017). When Landa attended school it was divided by tracks, 3 total. One track was entirely Armenian students while the other was Hispanics. According to Landa, students tend to form groups and segregate themselves. For example, students who weren’t born in the US would sit together in one side of the school. Landa explained, “It was more difficult for some kids to fit in the school than others because of how they looked or where they came from.” (E. Landa, personal communication, March 1 2017) Nieto (2004) describes racism and other forms of discrimination as “perceptions that one ethnic group, class, gender, or language is superior to all others.” (Nieto 2004) In this case, both the Hispanics and the Armenians did not want to bond with each other because one group thought they were superior over the other. Having segregation, discrimination, and racism is not acceptable in schools because it fosters an unhealthy environment that can lead to fights or other situations. At first, when a group of people segregate one student it is individual discrimination like described in the text; however, when a group of individuals begin to segregate everyone in the school based on certain characteristics then it is institutional discrimination making

Many dictionaries define animals as living things other than human beings or plants. However, in some dictionaries, there is another definition for animal, which shows how they distinguish animal and human: a live thing which behaves in a wild, aggressive, or unpleasant way. In Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the behavior of Max, the protagonist of the story, challenges the boundary line between the animal and human. The way human and animal live their life and convey their love severalizes human and animal.

What is the obsession with people’s need of identification? People need to understand that we all are different, not everybody can fit into a group. In her article, “Being an Other,” Melissa Algranati gives a personal narrative of her life and her parent 's life and how they faced discrimination and her struggles about being identified as an “other” even though she was an American born jewish and Puerto Rican. Michael Omi’s article “In Living Color: Race and American Culture” reinforces Algranati’s article since in his article he discusses about people ideas about race the stereotypes that they face. They have the same thought that Americans is obsessed with labelling people, they both discuss people’s assumptions of others based on how

The worst three plights that are discussed in Valencia’s Chicano School Failure and Success are language/cultural exclusion, teacher student interaction, and Chicano teaching force. Valencia discusses how “Chicano students have experienced persistent and persuasive language suppression and cultural exclusion” in the public-school system (8). These laws and policies were instated, with one purpose, “to ensure the dominance of the English language and Anglo culture” (Valencia 8). White culture enforced this belief, that being bilingual and bicultural will create a threat to the dominant white English-speaking population. In addition, another adversity Chicano students faced is the “limited use of bilingual education” (Valencia 9).

     Through our readings of the Mexicans in the U.S. and the African-American experience modules, we begin to understand the formation of identity through the hardships minorities faced from discrimination. In this paper, I am going to compare and contrast the ideas of identity shown through the readings. These two modules exemplify the theme of identity. We see how Blacks and Latinos tried to find their identity both personally and as a culture through the forced lifestyles they had to live.

Unless the expectation is that students possess the same “concept of otherness” related to individuals who reside in nations on the other side of the globe as they do of American who reside in neighboring communities, we must dismiss curriculum-based endeavors as an effective means to help students develop a well-rounded concept of

American culture, they often develop a sense of membership in the United States despite their legal status. For many, the United States is the only country they have ever known (p. 268). In a sense, these students feel they are a part of a system that is trying to exclude them despite their similarities and integration into aspects of that system.

I was intrigued by these differences in perspective, and attempted to understand why this was occurring. I first asked my parents, as I was only in the fifth grade, and their answer was simply that we were different, and that that wasn’t a bad thing. Feeling displaced, I began to question everything that I did on a regular basis, and if there was a proper manner in which to act for someone in my situation. The constant choice between my Mexican and American identity was always present.

However, many Hispanic families were and in some cases, still are viewed as lower-class citizens. According to Barrientos, “To me, speaking Spanish translated into being poor. It meant waiting tables and cleaning hotel rooms. It meant being left off the cheerleading squad and receiving a condescending smile from the guidance counselor when you said you planned on becoming a lawyer or a doctor” (561). They are not respected in a lot of communities, they live dirty, and they have bad jobs. These stereotypes are reasons why Barrientos did not want to be called Mexican and never wanted to learn Spanish. If diversity had been celebrated when Barrientos was a child, as it is celebrated and honored now, she would have grown up speaking Spanish and being proud of her heritage.