Excerpt From Bootstraps Victor Villanueva Analysis

After I read “Excerpt from Bootstraps: From an Academic of Color”, I thought author Victor Villanueva was writes about the challenges he faced. Victor Villanueva, he born in Puerto Rican immigrants, and grew up in New York. Firstly he got his GED and then joined the army. When he finished his time in the military and has to faces the decision of what to do next. The only option was college. He decides that a college would prepare him to better face the work force. He feels the course was easy when he was in college. Except the course with English. He describes how his writing assignments. According to Villanueva, he’d “gather pen and pad, and stare. Watch an “I Love Lucy” rerun. Stare.” His writing style went against what the class rules

He feels struggled. He had to work harder and received a failing grade on the first paper. However, he said “I was both devastated and determined, my not belonging was verified but I was not ready to be shut down.” He decided to search the school’s library to look up the publishing’s of his Professor. He would write his paper, research the Professors writing style, and then revise his own writing. He finds success in this strategy but still struggles with feeling “foreign” and isolated. He is the only “colored kid” in his classes and time constraints prevent him from being involved with groups that he could identify with. Still he would “pull up his bootstraps, looking out for number one.” Villanueva would go on to complete his BA and apply to the Graduate Program. It would be his “minority status,” not his test scores that allow him entry into the program. It’s a blow to his ego, but he’s in. It’s in this program that Villanueva encounters rhetoric. Rhetoric brings a new perspective to Villanueva’s struggles. He discovers that writing about what he took away from a reading was more important than what someone else wanted him to glean from it. He states, “What I would do is read and enjoy, when it was time to write, what I would write would be an explanation of what I had enjoyed.” It is this style of writing that Villanueva now brings to his students as a Professor of