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Jazz Owls Essay

Decent Essays

The novel Jazz Owls by Margarita Engle is an example of historical fiction. It is a book of free verse that shows the multiple perspectives of many characters. The book is set during World War Two and shows the perspectives of reporters, policemen, and sailors during the Zoot Suit Riots of the 1940s. It concentrates, however, on the perspectives of one Mexican-American family - Mami, Papa, Nicholas and Abuela, but mainly on 12 year-old Ray, 14 year-old Lorena, and 16 year-old Marisela. During this time, racial tension continued to grow between the sailors, who were in Los Angeles, California, waiting to be shipped off to war, and the Mexican-American youth. That racial tension erupted in violent riots that lasted a number of days. Lorena is …show more content…

When we meet Lorena at the beginning of the book, she is a 14 year-old girl who describes herself as “the calm, sensible one” (7). She quit school at the age of 12 after a teacher washed her mouth out with soap to speak Spanish. She says, “My crime”? Speaking words the teacher called dog language “Espanol, my family’s natural musica” (7). However, when life at the canning factory is no better, she says, “Maybe I should have stayed in school, because Spanish is forbidden here at work, too.I can’t let myself forget that being revealed as bilingual is a sure way to get fired” (12). Lorena is obviously frustrated and angry that her natural language is not allowed to be spoken, but she is unable to speak up for fear that she may lose her job, which means so much to her poor family. Lorena continues to explain how her race and the color of her skin affected her life when she says, “But I’m slightly darker brown than Marisela, so she would probably be the winner of any pageant judged by old Hollywood men, and I’ll never make it through a private school, unless I somehow manage to keep my cannery job long enough to save for tuition”

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