ipl-logo

Analysis Of Francisco Cantu's 'Bajadas'

1422 Words6 Pages

Francisco Cantu explores the physical and emotional landscapes that shift during his time as a United States border control agent in his essay Bajadas. He candidly writes about his experiences, using imagery to describe the physical landscape of New Mexico in a way that mirrors his own emotional landscape and answers the question that he grapples with most. Cantu writes, “There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this? I wonder sometimes how I might explain certain things…” (7). This important question is what drives Bajadas; it is what compels Cantu to write so vulnerably. Through a journal-like structure, Cantu details what his job requires of him and the way he treats …show more content…

He admits, “…I don’t truly understand the landscape, I don’t know how to handle myself in the face of ugliness or danger” (3). In this passage, Cantu establishes the relationship between the physical landscape and his own emotional landscape. This becomes an important foundation for the way he later connects the physical landscape around him to his emotions. At the end of the same entry, Cantu describes his morning view: “I watched as the landscape shifted under the winter light. Behind me, my mother placed her hand on my shoulder and pointed to a cloud of gypsum sand in the distance, impossibly small, swirling across the basin desert.” It is evident in these passages that Cantu is at the beginning stages of his job as a border patrol agent, and he still does not know what it means to be good at his job. The imagery of a landscape shifting under “winter light” describes the way light shifts and brings attention to things otherwise not noticed in darkness and shadow. Similarly, Cantu’s life is shifting, and light is being shed on his own inexperience and the questions he has surrounding his job. The description of “a cloud of gypsum sand in the distance,” suggests that Cantu recognizes that impending challenges are unavoidable in the future, but for now they are distant and “impossibly small;” he does not have to address them head on. However, the description that these clouds of sand are “swirling across the basin desert” suggest that Cantu is still clouded by thoughts of uncertainty that will not settle, no matter how small they are in the

Show More
Related

  • Fresh Fruit Broken Bodies Chapter Summaries

    1211 Words  | 5 Pages

    Seth M. Holmes is the anthropologist behind the work Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. This book is about an almost hidden world of migrant farm laborers in the USA. This group of hidden people is responsible for providing the United States with fresh fruit and for very little money and poor living conditions. Holmes has written this ethnography to shed light on the downside of agribusiness while showcasing the physical and social problems Mexican workers face in Washington and California while working in the fields providing the United States with fruit. Chapter 1 of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies details the author’s trip from Oaxaca, Mexico to the border of the United States.

    Read More

  • Summary Of Labor And Inequality By Ruth Gomberg-Munoz

    1279 Words  | 6 Pages

    Ruth Gomberg-Munoz's Labor and Legaility: An Ethnography of a Mexican Immigrant Network, describes the lives of undocumented immigrants from Mexico who work as busboys In a Chicago restaurant. Gomberg-Munoz gives insight into the new lives of the boys, through her compilation of their experiences both before crossing the border and after moving away from home into an unknown world. As an ethnography, the book gives information and details of the workers without arguing or taking a stance on immigration itself; it is instead presented in a manner that attempts to give readers a full understanding of the undocumented life through the revelation of the ones living it. She provides readers with a perspective on the daily struggles faced when living

    Read More

  • Summary Of Migra ! A History Of The US Border Patrol

    1267 Words  | 6 Pages

    In the book “Migra! A History of the U.S Border Patrol, author Kelly Lytle Hernandez describes the history of the U.S border patrol from the 1920s to the end of the twentieth century. Specifically, Hernandez writes about how the border patrol has changed its target or “suspect” from Chinese and European immigrants to Mexican people. In her book and through research of unexamined old material in the U.S and Mexico, Hernandez examines how Mexicans emerged as the United States “iconic illegal aliens” (Hernandez Pg. 2). In this paper I will examine Hernandez discussion of long term effects of border patrol discourses and practices in creating a prototypical suspect as well as compare her argument with that of Samual P. Huntington in his

    Read More

  • John Mandel Station 11 Analysis

    725 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the beginning of the passage, Mandel uses imagery and tone to help readers experience a life where the seemingly insignificant details of life that are taken for granted are no longer present. The passage begins elaborating on the lack of these everyday beauties that are not appreciated, such as pools filled with “chlorinated water lit green from below” and “porch lights with moths fluttering” around them in the summer night air. Her use of imagery offers a sensory experience and allows the reader to visualize the beautiful scene, but then to also feel reminiscent when the reader understands that these beauties are no longer existent in a post-apocalyptic civilization. The lack of trivial delicacies that surround everyday human society are taken for granted and Mandel is able to allow readers to feel nostalgic even if they themselves are not in a dystopia. Nearing the middle of the passage, Mandel imparts a grim tone and says that in this post-apocalyptic society there was no longer the “certainty of surviving a

    Read More

  • Outermost House By Henry Beston Analysis

    1259 Words  | 6 Pages

    In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year” (Beston). From the passage above, it seemed clear what Beston thought after his war experiences. It seemed clear what he thought of the world insofar as we, humanity, had marked it; in the same way that the terrible things he and men

    Read More

  • Summary Of A Gringo In The Lettuce Fields By Gabriel Thompson

    309 Words  | 2 Pages

    In “A Gringo in the Lettuce Fields,” author Gabriel Thompson presents a look into the life of a migrant worker in the lettuce fields in Yuma Arizona. First, Thompson gives a first look into the job by describing what the area of the fields look like. “I wake up staring into the bluest blue I’ve ever seen. ”(89) “To my left, in the distance, a border patrol helicopter is hovering.

    Read More

  • Rhetorical Analysis Walden

    441 Words  | 2 Pages

    But, nature does not exclude humans, human excludes themselves from nature. Within the “mists of [the] chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand and one items to be allowed for”(277). He uses clouds and storms and quicksands to convey that civilized life includes the same negativity included in the connotation of those conditions, but nonetheless, those too are apart of nature. The purpose of utilizing imagery is so evoke images people already have to connect with them on that level to make them understand that they must find a harmony and balance in the world. So, in order to restore order within one’s individual life, one must defy the social norms that distance themselves from nature to find harmony with it.

    Read More

  • Review Of The Devil's Highway By Luis Alberto Urrea

    785 Words  | 4 Pages

    Urrea endeavors to show the complex and dynamic factors that make the interplay, which leads to the problem of immigration. As such, the work highlights more than just immigration. Above all, Urrea focuses more on drawing attention guides or Coyotes that work in a gang-like manner to ferry immigrants for a pay. The groups immigrants or walkers put their fate in the hands of the guides after paying a fee that will guarantee their safe transit, but as they later realize the transit is never any safe, but a rather a journey of many challenges. In the case highlighted by Urrea, the Coyotes lead the group of walkers to a trail

    Read More

  • Rachel St John Line In The Sand Summary

    1022 Words  | 5 Pages

    In Rachel St. John’s book, “Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border,” the author offers up “a history of how and why the border changed” (St. John 1). This is her central thesis that she presents, providing evidence and historical context concerning the border and its changes over the course of the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. In seven chapters plus and introduction providing more general information and a conclusion that brings the U.S.-Mexico border situation into the present day, Rachel St. John’s focus is both periodical and geographical. St. John moves across both space and time in her book, looking at how region and era affected the border situation and how these effects differed in significance. St. John takes

    Read More

  • Macaria's Daughter Analysis

    1149 Words  | 5 Pages

    Situated near the U.S.-Mexico border during the early twentieth century is the fictional setting of Fort Jones, the outskirts of which is where Americo Paredes’ short story “Macaria’s Daughter” takes place. Emblematic of the disappropriation of Mexican land, as well as the increased marginalization of the Mexican people, the overbearing presence of Fort Jones reveals the struggle for preservation that characterizes the Mexican-American community of the story. “Macaria’s Daughter” is the tragic account of what happens in a small community when the upholding of Mexican values and institutions, and opposition to Anglo-American culture, become more important than a young woman’s life. In this essay, I will argue that “Macaria’s Daughter” is a text

    Read More

  • Avocado Lake Gary Soto Analysis

    1578 Words  | 7 Pages

    “Oranges,” “The Seventieth Year,” and “Avocado Lake,” showcase Soto’s ability to move a reader using an emotional story without the use of rhyme or rhythm. Through Soto’s poetry, he indicates the traits that define Mexican-American community

    Read More

  • A Literature Of Place Barry Lopez Summary

    479 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the essay, “A Literature of Place”, by Barry Lopez focuses on the topic of human relationships with nature. He believes human imagination is shaped by the architectures it encounters within life. Lopez first starts his essay with the statement that geography is a shaping force for humans. This shaping force is what creates our imagination; the shaping force is found within nature. Everything humans see within nature is remembered, thus creating new ideas and thoughts for our imagination.

    Read More

  • La Mexicano Analysis

    871 Words  | 4 Pages

    Octavio Paz, a Mexican poet and essayist, is one of the many philosophers with a written piece regarding his understanding of Lo Mexicano. Paz’s “Sons of La Malinche” was first published in the Labyrinth of Solitude in 1950 and is a rather grim interpretation of the Mexican character, however, it captures the crisis of identity that Mexico was burdened with after the conquest. Paz uses the Spanish term “chingar,” (when literally translated means “to screw, to violate”) and its associated phrases to understand the conquest and the effect

    Read More

  • Rhetorical Analysis Of 'The Danger Of A Single Story'

    835 Words  | 4 Pages

    How powerful is a single story? At Ted Global 2009, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian novelist, expresses her view of single stories and the ways in which they are used to create stereotypes and divides us as a people. Adichie’s talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”, stimulates careful consideration to what happens when people and situations are reduced to a single narrative. She believes single stories are highly correlated with the power structures of the world and have the ability to strip people of their humanity.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Gloria Anzaldua's To Live In The Borderlands

    1054 Words  | 5 Pages

    In the poem “To live in the Borderlands means you”, the borderlands become a place of change, such as changing from just one culture or race into a diverse culture or race and not-belonging. (Singh, A., & Schmidt, P. 2000). The poem describes how the author’s own background ethnicity people, mixicanas, identifies people like her, chicanas, as “split or mixture that means to betray your word and they deny “Anlo inside you.” (Anzaldua, F. 1987). The poem describes that the borderland is a place of contradiction, such as of home not being a home.

    Read More

More about Analysis Of Francisco Cantu's 'Bajadas'

Open Document