Saguaros Response Essay

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Throughout generational lifetimes, we see the impacts of trauma within families of Hispanic background, leading to attempts by the younger ones to overcome generational trauma. In Javier Zamora’s “Saguaros” the author utilizes the reminiscent poem to recall the harsh realities of immigration in an attempt to demonstrate the complexities that come with recalling and dealing with past traumas. Within this interpretive text, we can see how Zamora recalls past traumatic events in attempts to demonstrate the impact it has on an individual. At an initial read, we see that the author recalls these events in a negative light, however, his choice in adding utopic-like references at the beginning demonstrates how personalized coping mechanisms can be. …show more content…

We see this instance reappear further through the text with the line “so I drive to botanical gardens” (6) in reference to the speaker searching for food as a means of survival. When we see that both of these instances are followed by frightening recollections of time, we can infer that the speaker is attempting to romanticize their current situation in order to get through the harsh reality. Throughout this text, we see that Zamora constantly alludes to images of jail cells in order to reference the scary reality of illegal immigration. The first instance appears when the author uses the epizeuxis of “barbwire and barbwire”(3) to give the reader not only an image of the speaker’s surroundings, but also imply (and maybe even foreshadow) that the fear of being caught by La Migra is an over-consuming state. The author’s decision to repeat this word emphasizes the idea that the neverending border walls consume their every thought. The title “Saguaros” is a repeating theme throughout the poem that manages to depict a similar technique, despite its singular reference in line

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