Comparing Manazar Gamboa's Memories Around A Bulldozed Barrio

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Manazar Gamboa’s Memories Around a Bulldozed Barrio and Langston Hughes Montage of a deferred Dream demonstrate two communities transitioning to different communal structures. Larger society homogenizes both poem’s characters to arbitrary molds that are composed to the assumed collective common characteristics of race and gender. Although in Montage of a Dream Deferred white society representation is minimal, the narrator’s presumptions about other people in the community blends with the public collective attitude. Gesellschaft mangles the individual African-American conception, and as a result, the poem’s narrators predetermine people according to a negative scale associated with a degree of darkness or values attributed to ‘womanness’ which …show more content…

For although the narrator understands the complexity of his own community, he fails to enfranchise his judgement from the collective. Thus the guidelines of what constructs the broken community of the narrators reshape to not be determined according to color nor even ethnicity, as “Sometimes I think / Jews must have heard /the music of a / dream deferred. /” (Likewise 27-30) breaks down the ethnic boundary and redefines—their fragmented community—as the people undergoing common circumstances within his circumferential ecosystem. However, in contrast, Memories of a Bulldozed Barrio retains Gemeinschaft as a result of their circumferential ecosystem is built by socialist labor and an ideal to “raise a Mexican village, . . . all within the confines of this gringo city”(Gamboa 34), for the community is symbolically reclaiming land previously lost. Hughe’s collective poem represents a Gemeinschaft “in transition” (Hughes 1) to a capitalist Gesellschaft represented in the poetic discourse that reveals the narrator’s dispositions toward African Americans and representation of women, while on the other hand, Memories of a Bulldozed Bario is “a community in transition” (1) to a socialist Gemeinschaft represented in the constructing of an ethnic

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