Daughter My thoughts on Carmen Aguirre’s memoirs are that of a mind opening and revolutionary perspective of what facts and stats cannot express. Carmen Aguirre gives an in depth and personal approach for educating people about what it was like to be a part of the Pinochet resistance in Latin America. Her first-hand approach to delivering details from her young childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood years illustrates the real-world struggles that millions of people endured during those times of Neo-capitalism. In this review of her works, I will be dissecting Aguirre’s effectiveness of persuading the reader to sympathize with her in the fight for social justice. Additionally, I will discuss the use of her step father, Bob, as an unknown hero in a relatively unknown battle. Furthermore, I will then be discussing an analytical …show more content…
Moreover, this article will segue as a tool for comparing the relationship between North America and Latin America. Lastly, I will be discussing the importance of an emotional connection through memoirs, while contrasting it with the analytical journal article to understand the differences between depth and intellectual understanding the complex geography of the Americas. Aguirre’s memoirs of her young life as a member of the Resistance in Chile describe an incredible amount of hardship and atypical life as a young person. As a reader, I found myself in an unforeseen relationship with the Latin American impoverished population. Aguirre’s recollection of events portrays a widely untold story in which millions of people had experienced and endured. I found myself enlightened by the way Aguirre brought forth her defining moments. Oddly enough, I felt as though I could sympathize with her stories
...teenth century in South America. His articulation of the disastrous and catastrophic event was detailed, strong, and emotionally invoking. It compelled me to think about how things could have been. What if the viceroy had fully succeeded? What if he had never tried to change Lima’s political, social, or architectural structure? And how might that have affected such a cultural epicenter of that time period? He gives the audience an opportunity to nearly relive the event, but also experience a part of the event aside from the natural disasters that were just as effective to the people of Lima, their future, and the future of their city.
Alfredo Corchado — is the author of the book named " Midnight in Mexico:A Reporter's Journey through a Country's Descent into Darkness”. We are, probably, all interested in finding out the facts, news, and gossips about Mexico. This country was always associated with something mysterious. For me personally, the title of the book seemed to be very gripping, I was interested in revealing the secrets of life in Mexico, thus I decided to read this book. I was really curious, what can Alfredo Corchado tell me about the life in this country, the country, where the constant massacre is the picture, people used to see. In his book, the author tells the reader about the real situations, which took place in Mexico, reveals the secrets of the people’s lives and tells the story from the “inside”. He describes the way he lives his life, and does his work. The " Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter's Journey through a Country's Descent into Darkness” is a memoir. Author tries to transform his own experience into the story line. Corchado shows the reader the darkest episodes of Mexican society, while relying on his own experience.
Norma Elia Cantu’s novel “Canícula: Imágenes de una Niñez Fronteriza” (“Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera”), which chronicles of the forthcoming of age of a chicana on the U.S.- Mexico border in the town of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo in the 1940s-60s. Norma Elia Cantú brings together narrative and the images from the family album to tell the story of her family. It blends authentic snapshots with recreated memoirs from 1880 to 1950 in the town between Monterrey, Mexico, and San Antonio, Texas. Narratives present ethnographic information concerning the nationally distributed mass media in the border region. Also they study controversial discourse that challenges the manner in which the border and its populations have been portrayed in the U.S. and Mexico. The canícula in the title symbolizes “The dog days of 1993,” an intense part of summer when the cotton is harvested in South Texas. The canícula also represents summer and fall; also important seasons and concepts of that bridge between child and adulthood. She describes imaginative autobioethnography life growing up on ...
It is no secret that the United States has a history of economic and political interventions in countries around the world, especially in Latin America. By comparing the lives of the characters in Tobar’s novel, The Tattooed Soldier, to events that occurred in Latin American history, this paper will focus specifically on how U.S. imperialism, political and economic interventions in the central American countries of Guatemala and El Salvador forced many to flee and immigrate to the United states. Where the newly immigrated Central Americans faced lives of hardships and poverty compared to other Latin communities such as the Cubans who had an easier migration due to their acquisition of the refuge status.
In Elvia Alvarado’s memoir Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart, she expresses the struggles that people such as herself, and numerous other Honduran citizens face every day. Elvia Alvarado was a Honduran woman, who was considered a peasant. She was born into a poor family in the countryside of Honduras. The book retails stories from Alvarado’s life and the obstacles she is forced to overcome in hopes of achieving a better life for herself and the people around her. She faces oppression due to her social class, ideals, and especially her gender. At the same time though, she is able to find support through these communities. While the odds are stacked against Elvia Alvarado, she is able to continuously preserve,
The author of Mexican Lives, Judith Adler Hellman, grapples with the United States’ economic relationship with their neighbors to the south, Mexico. It also considers, through many interviews, the affairs of one nation. It is a work held to high esteem by many critics, who view this work as an essential part in truly understanding and capturing Mexico’s history. In Mexican Lives, Hellman presents us with a cast from all walks of life. This enables a reader to get more than one perspective, which tends to be bias. It also gives a more inclusive view of the nation of Mexico as a whole. Dealing with rebel activity, free trade, assassinations and their transition into the modern age, it justly captures a Mexico in its true light.
Colonial Latin American society in the Seventeenth Century was undergoing a tremendous amount of changes. Society was transforming from a conquering phase into a colonizing phase. New institutions were forming and new people and ideas flooded into the new lands freshly claimed for the Spanish Empire. Two remarkable women, radically different from each other, who lived during this period of change are a lenses through which many of the new institutions and changes can be viewed. Sor Juana and Catalina de Erauso are exceptional women who in no way represent the norm but through their extraordinary tales and by discovering what makes them so extraordinary we can deduce what was the norm and how society functioned during this era of Colonial Latin America.
Julia Alvarez wrote the novel “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents”. Alvarez, (a Dominican-American novelist) was born in New York City. Her story is about four sisters (The Garcia family) who were living an established, upper class life in the Dominican Republic. They were forced to flee from the Dominican Republic to the United States due to their father’s opposition to Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. The Garcia family were forced to face the challenges that came along with being an immigrant family in a foreign land. In her novel “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,” Alvarez highlights the challenges of immigration, cultural readjustments and family conflicts.
As you read you can picture his settings and characters. For the purpose of this book review, the reader will discuss how a migrant community in search of the “American Dream” encounters the “American Nightmare” as described by Tomás Rivera in his novel, “ …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him.”
Oftentimes, societal problems span across space and time. This is certainly evident in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents a novel in which women are treated peripherally in two starkly different societies. Contextually, both the Dominican Republic and the United States are very dissimilar countries in terms of culture, economic development, and governmental structure. These factors contribute to the manner in which each society treats women. The García girls’ movement between countries helps display these societal distinctions. Ultimately, women are marginalized in both Dominican and American societies. In the Dominican Republic, women are treated as inferior and have limited freedoms whereas in the United States, immigrant
The autobiography Journey of Hope Memoirs of a Mexican Girl and the documentary short “Children in No Man’s Land” has brought into light three important topics that are results of immigration. The first is the “American dream” and the notion of yearning to migrate abroad to seek dreams formed by misconceptions of the limited knowledge one has of their destination. The second is assimilation and the process of assimilating oneself to their new homeland. The third is a unique situation presented in both these works, which is estrangement from their family members. This paper attempts to critically analyze the unique journey of immigration for Rosalina, Maria de Jesus, and Rene. It argues that glorified images and dreams of what America could be like falsely creates a sense of hope. It focuses on the dual task of reviewing the process of assimilation based on each immigrant situation, and an examination of familial estrangement as
The. Heyck, Denis Lynn Daly. Life Stories of the Nicaraguan Revolution. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. The.
Se trata de un viaje de aproximadamente un mes y medio cuya duración se divide en dos etapas: un itinerario americano y otro español.Aproximadamente 250 jóvenes de 50 países estudian la historia, geografía y cultura del país o países que se recorren mediante visitas a lugares históricos y conferencias que se imparten durante el viaje.A los expedicionarios se les muestran las maravillas de las culturas y civilizaciones iberoamericanas así como sus aspectos comunes y sus contrastes con España.
Filmmaker Oliver Stone embarked on a journey across the Latin American continent pursuant to the filling of gaps left by mainstream media about the social and political movements in the southern continent. Through a series of interviews he conducted with Presidents Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Cristina Kirchner and former president Nėstor Kirchner of Argentina, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, Lula da Silva of Brazil, Rafael Correa of Ecuador and Raúl Castro of Cuba, Stone was able to compare firsthand information from the leaders themselves with that reported and published by the media (“Synopsis,” n.d.). It gives light to the measures these leaders had to take in order to initiate change in their respective countries, even if their public identities were at stake. Several instances in the film showed the mismatch between these two sources, pointing at the US government’s interests for greatly influencing the media for presenting biased, groundless views.
Pablo Neruda is from Chile and gives a voice to Latin America in his poetry (Bleiker 1129). “The United Fruit Co.,” the poem by Pablo Neruda that will be analyzed in this essay, is enriched with symbolism, metaphors, and allusions. These allusions have great emphasis to the Christian religion, but some allusions are used to evoke negative emotions towards the United States (Fernandez 1; Hawkins 42). Personification and imagery along with onomatopoeia and metonymy are also found in “The United Fruit Co.” Neruda’s use of these literary devices makes his messages of imperialism, Marxism, and consumerism understandable (Fernandez 4). In this essay each of these literary devices with its proper meaning will be further analyzed in the hope of achieving a more complex understanding of Neruda’s message.