Summary Of Small Change By Julia Alvarez

Book Summary Under the Mesquite is a story about a fourteen year old girl named Lupita from Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico. Lupita is the oldest child of eight and discovers that her mother has been diagnosed with cancer. Lupita is faced with leaving Mexico and coming to the United states to move to Eagle Pass, Texas. Lupita must face cultural adjustments and acclimate to a new home. Lupita has more responsibilities than a typical fourteen year old teenager of dealing with her mother’s illness, school, being a caregiver to her younger siblings, and conflict with friends and family.

Assimilating into a new society is difficult and full of plight, but when you are leaving a dangerous country into an unfamiliar one, then that is when all hell breaks loose. “The Daughters of Invention” illustrates the family struggles of Julia Alvarez and her family back in the 1960s. Alvarez’s family left Trujillo’s harsh dictatorship after Alvarez’s father attempted plot to overthrow Trujillo was revealed. Rafael Trujillo was a dictator that turned Dominican Republic into a horror environment. People feared their lives and futures.

Native American literature and Latin American literature are like two pieces of the same pie, they may be different in appearance, but deep down, they share similar roots and characteristics. Both Junot Diaz and Sherman Alexie come from a modest minority family but have used their intelligence and knack for writing to make it and live a life in the United States, thriving. “How to Date a Browngirl,” by Junot Diaz is told in second person point of view, as a list for the reader on how to handle a date with a girl. The speaker provides many tips and steps on how to have a good time and look good for a girl as the story progresses. In “How to Fight Monsters,” by Sherman Alexie, Junior faces a whole different set of problems, instead of having

Alvarez and her family have a lot of trauma considering there lives in the dominican republic and living under the dictator,through it all alvarez's parents raised a daughter who would share their story in a fashionable matter that told the story how it was.

Over the years of fitting in, she enjoyed her independence but believed it “…didn’t have to be an exile…” (Alvarez 1304) from her native ways. In regaining her identity, she believes she must reconnect with her favorite childhood “…antojos, guavas…” (Alvarez 1300). In finding and eating the guavas, it is her way of reconnecting with her family and calling back the memories of the once Dominican

We hear the word romance and instinctively, we think about love, passion, marriage, and women. In his essay “Mexicans, Foundational Fictions, and the United States: Caballero, a Late Border Romance,” Jose E. Limón describes how the novel Caballero exemplifies different aspects of the historical romance genre, including the idea that the marriages presented in the novel between American men and Mexican señoritas can be seen as a “consolidation of the groups they semi-allegorically represent” (Limón 350). I agree with Limón’s interpretation of the intermarriages between the Mendoza y Soria girls and the Americanos symbolizing both cultures coming together and foreshadowing change. However, I would add that González and Raleigh present the intermarriages as characteristic of the two subcategories of the historical romance genre: fantasy and realism. By analyzing the passion and sexual desire, as well as the political and social changes prevalent in the time period, González and Raleigh are able to fully develop the narrative of a Mexican American historical romance novel.

When some mexicans shifted to Mexico City they struggled to adapt. However later “A third of labor in Mexico City was made up of women, 82% of whom were indians or mestizas”(Vigil 136). Shifting from an hacienda to a city was very different for both females and males. However women could not believe that they could soon begin working as domestic workers as well. Such as being waitresses, food preparers, and street vendors.

Lola takes advantage of her deteriorating mother whose illness represents the declining hold of the norms over Lola. Since her mom “will have trouble lifting her arms over her head for the rest of her life,” Lola is no longer afraid of the “hitting” and grabbing “by the throat” (415,419). As a child of a “Old World Dominican Mother” Lola must be surrounded by traditional values and beliefs that she does not want to claim, so “as soon as she became sick” Lola says, “I saw my chance and I’m not going to pretend or apologize; I saw my chance and I eventually took it” (416). When taking the opportunity to distinguish herself from the typical “Dominican daughter” or ‘Dominican slave,” she takes a cultural norm like long hair and decides to impulsively change it (416). Lola enjoyed the “feeling in [her] blood, the rattle” that she got when she told Karen to “cut my hair” (418).

The foundation and development of a human being stems from the individual’s position within his/her life (for instance, his/her opinion, stance, about oneself in regards to his/her own expectations) and within his/her communities as a member of a household, a race or even as a gender. The key factor of this notion, take in consideration the vast knowledge a person can evaluate against their own understanding. A person emerge into the world as a blank slate that unconsciously and continuously devouring and weaving in stories told in voices that evokes correlation identification with an image created by a mother, father, brothers, sister, aunt, uncle, cousins, grandma, grandpa, and even nicknamed strangers into their root and skin. An open-minded

Luis is working at the junkyard when a girl around his age drives up to ask for a part for her car. Luis stares off to the side and begins to space out. Luis describes the girl saying, “She stood in the sunlight in her white sundress waiting for his father, while Luis stared. She was like a smooth wood carving. Her skin was mahogany, almost black, and her arms and legs were long and thin, but curved in places so that she did not look bony and hard- more like a ballerina. ...

In search for a better life outside of the Dominican Republic, Anita’s whole family tries to move to America. One day sitting in her room, Anita look out her window to see no one left on the compound. Anita explains, “I look out the door and down the dark driveway. The whole flock of our family has fled. Only Mami and Chucha and I are left (pg.100 p.9).”Her whole family has gone to America to be free, leaving everything behind.

Oscar Casares created a very believable character in “Mrs. Perez” by writing about Lolas passion, bowling, and including flash backs about her younger life and family. He used these flash backs and incorporated her family to go into depth about her past, and let the readers infer why she is the way she is. The bowling ball that is repeatedly mentioned throughout the story contrast her past life. By giving her a hobby, and showing the struggles she has experienced in her past, she becomes like a real person readers empathize with. To begin with, Casares often went back in time to show her seemingly unhappy life with her now deceased husband.

This caused her to alienate herself since her mother asked her to keep a part of herself hidden from the world by binding her and making sure no one found out she menstruated ealy (Anzaldúa 1983, 221). This will later isolate her further but ultimately lead her to reflect on the racism that surrounds her. In addition, Anzaldúa’s identity also suffer because she denied her heritage and the traditions that with it. She mentions that she felt ashamed of her mother and her loud tendencies, it is an archetype that most Hispanic mothers are loud by nature, and the fact that her lunches, or “lonches”, consisted

Up until the 1960s Anglo social scientists wrote most of the literature about the people of Mexican- descent in the United States. Their analysis of Mexican American culture and history reflected the hegemonic beliefs, values, and perceptions of their society. As outsiders, Anglo scholars were led by their own biases and viewed Mexicans as inferior, savage, unworthy and different. Because Mexican scholars had not yet begun to write about their own experiences, these stereotypes were legitimized and reproduced in the literature. However, during the mid- 1960s scholars such as Octavio Ignacio Romano, Nick Vaca, Francisco Armando Rios, and Ralph Ricatelli began to reevaluate the literature written by their predecessors.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a satirical novel written by esteemed Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, published in 1981. Originally written in Spanish, the novel was translated into English by Gregory Rabassa in 1982. The novel, set in 1950s Colombia, outlines the events surrounding the Vicario brothers’ murder of Santiago Nasar, a man accused of taking the virginity of their sister, Angela Vicario. The novel is written in a pseudo-journalistic, non-sequential reconstruction of events by the narrator. The narrator is a journalist and old friend of Santiago Nasar returning to the small town in which the events of the novel take place, intending to unravel the mystery surrounding the murder.