...assimilated in their new communities their language no longer reflects that of their identity but of their new cultural surroundings. When an immigrant, immigrates to a new country they become marginalized, they’re alienated from common cultural practices, social ritual, and scripted behavior. It’s not without intercultural communication and negotiation do immigrants conform to new surroundings. In “Drown,” the title story of his narrative collection, Junot Diaz enumerates the story of a Hispanic youth growing up in New Jersey. Though Diaz explores issues of queerness, shamelessness, and familial relations within this selection, it is his use of language that proves most intriguing. Rather than simply describing the struggles of adapting to a new language or customs, Diaz portrays how, at an early age, he manipulated language as a tool to makes sense of his new hybrid identity. The use of language in Junot Diaz’s Drown is spare and unadorned, often rendered in "Spanglish," an unpredictable mixture of both English and Spanish. Diaz uses Spanish words in the midst of standard English sentences to fortify the differences between Dominican and American cultures. Although, the integration of street slang with Spanish may confound the typical reader, it accurately depicts the taxing experience of new immigrants struggling to make sense of new phenomena in the United States and engages the harsh reality of the multilingualism. The difference in language between the Dominican and...
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...In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, isolation is a common theme that contributes to character development throughout the novel. Junot Diaz, in his narration of Oscar’s life through the eyes of Yunior, induces the idea that isolation is a self-imagined way for a character or person to justify his/her differences from society and the people around them. While there are outside forces that contribute to the feeling of isolation, such as cultural differences, immigration, and gender stereotypes and expectations; in the end, Diaz firmly believes that a person’s feeling of isolation is a crutch to reason why he/she does not fit in. Diaz believes that the feeling of isolation is a self-imagined feeling that helps a person justify why he/she is an outcast in society. In the novel, the theme of isolation is common throughout all the main characters; Oscar, Lola, and Beli. To start with, Oscar begins as a typical Dominican male. As a child, Oscar was considered “a Casanova” who was “a ‘normal’ Dominican boy raised in a ‘typical’ Dominican family” (11). Oscar eventually grows “fatter and fatter,” develops “zits,” and gets “self-conscious” because his “interest in “Genres...bec[o]me[s] synonymous with being a loser...” (16, 17). Because Oscar suddenly turns into an outcast, he blames his dorkiness and homely appearance for his lack of acceptance by the outside world. What Diaz underlines, though, is that Oscar has control over his life, but isolates himself by letting...
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...“True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost” (Arthur Ashe). In Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Oscar de León, the novel’s tragic hero and helpless romantic, trudges through life as an atypical Dominican—“he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock” (Díaz 11)—until he, contentiously, is the first to beat Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina’s fukú americanus. Two distinctly different caricatures of the true hero have been drawn by society, each sanctified by Hollywood films in its own right: the “superhero” who retains esoteric powers and uses these for the...
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...In Juanto Diaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao the story of the book jumped from different country's to different time lines. Oscar Wao and his family line lives is what the book is manly centered about. It took place in either Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic or in Paterson, New Jersey which have different effects on the story and how it's going. In Paterson, New Jersey it has a more of laid back type of feel to it compared to a more scary and violent Santo Domingo. In Santo Domingo it was a time where Rafael Trujillo was the dictator that would have you killed if said anything about him. People lived in fear and constantly watching who they interacted with because if you were see with the wrong crowd its night night for you. Oscars mother grew up...
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...In “The Dreamer,” Junot Diaz reflects on his mother’s childhood. Diaz’s mother lived in a Third-World country, Dominican. His mother worked on his grandmother’s farm and would not let her get an education. Although one day the county got a new dictator Trujillo, which he put into effect mandatory education to children under fifteen-years-old. Diaz’s mother tried so hard to acquire an education because her dream was to one day become a nurse. I am inspired by Diaz's essay both because of what his mother did in order to education and also because of what a mother’s abilities can go on their son. To begin with, Diaz’s essay was an inspiration to me because his mother had to go a remarkable length to get an education. Firstly, Diaz writes “Her...
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...The American Dream: the belief that in America, anyone can make something of themselves. However, is the American Dream a reality or is it simply an illusion? In the novel, Drown, by Junot Diaz, the author describes the story of a young boy, Yunior, who grows up in poverty in the Dominican Republic. The son of a man who has left his family to find a better life in America, Yunior struggles to understand who he is while also understanding his culture and the direction of his future. After immigrating to America with his mother and brother, Yunior realizes that life in Paterson, New Jersey, is not everything he imagined it would be. He falls into a life of crime and drugs, shutting himself off from the opportunities, while also realizing that...
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...This is a story about a guy named Julian who is accompanying his mother to an evening exercise class. They live on the poor side of town even though they come from a family with old money. Julian is an aspiring writer who sells typewriters, having just graduated from college. They catch the bus, and his mother, an opinionated old woman, expresses her dislike and distrust of Blacks. As Julian is disgusted with his mother's prejudice, a Black woman and her young son enter the bus. Julian smiles as he sees that both the woman and his mother are wearing the same hat. Julian's mother takes kindly to the young boy and as they are both getting off the bus at the same stop, his mother offers the boy a penny. Insulted, the boy's mother gets upset and punches Julian's mother in the face. Embarrassed, his mother decides to skip the class and walk home. In the end, Julian's mother passes out on the sidewalk. The idea of identity is a big part of this story. Both Julian and his mother claim to know their own identity. Julian, for the most part, sees and knows who he is. He's a college graduate trying to make it in the world. However, his mother is self-delusional. The mother's identity is an identity from the past and this allows her to see the world as someone from a different time. And it's in this time that she sees herself that she views the world as a rich woman from old money who owns servants and lives an entitled life. But her reality is quite different. She is neither wealthy...
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...Halfie” by Junot Diaz “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” is a short story by Junot Diaz. The short story takes the semblance of an instructional manual, or guide, asserting guidance as to how to act or behave depending upon the ethnicity and social class of the reader’s date. Diaz’s dating guide, aimed toward teenage males, accomplishes authority of knowledge by delivering the short story in second person. It can easily be concluded that the narrator is to be a teenage boy, Yunior, whom the story is centered around. Yunior is trying to win impress and win over the local girls, hoping to get sexual favors in return. Nonetheless, because of his background and culture, he knows he has to withdraw his identity in order to please a white girl or a “halfie”. In the story, it can be implied that a halfie is person of mixed ethnicity. You see the numerous scopes of this one character, all transported out by race. Diaz gives directions about meal accommodations, politeness toward the date’s parent, hygiene, and household cleanliness. Basically, these directions are administered in effects to win over the young lady. Certainly, Diaz is not afraid to assert trivial signs that disclose ethnic insolences, even if they diminish Dominican ethnicity. Certainly, there is a power relationship of race in “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie”. Color is an immense portion of this story, and a great share of how he treats each category of lassie. Diaz describes...
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...Lessons from the Alpha Male: “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” by Junot Diaz Every red-blooded American male reaches a zenith in his life when he has finally joined the company of men, and been deemed worthy to receive a lifetime of collected wisdom and tutelage from his elder “packmates”. This knowledge comes in both lewd and often brutally honest sentiments that can induce feelings of excitement and unabashed shame, but regardless of the emotions evoked, it is a necessary rite of passage signifying a young man’s entrance into the world of his peers. This transformation and the hesitance involved is masterfully scripted in Junot Diaz’s “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie”. The dialogue that plays out in this story is remarkably descriptive but demonstrates often the characterizations we accept as young men that masquerade as truths and become almost necessary for our acceptance by our gender. Diaz removes the veil on this time in a young man’s life and allows the reader into a world of confusion, pressure, and eagerness which highlights the extraneous difficulties of being both male and a minority in America during these crucial formative years. In life, the first step of any journey begins with preparation and Diaz opens his story with an older male, which who believe to be a friend, instructing a younger pupil on how to organize and clean his house in accordance with the economic status of the girl he will be having over...
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...started to fight for their rights and wanted more power in the political scene. By the late 1940’s most countries went through military coups because the large landowners and industrial owners where not happy that the government was helping the lower class and taking land from them. The middle was not a progressive middle class because since the 1910s, the upper class had all the power and if anything changed it was because the lower class was behind it. In Mexico the middle class was not making a difference because they did not have any power politically and they were such a small percentage of the population. The Mexican revolution started with the upper class in 1910. Francisco Madero, a wealthy landowner, overthrows the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship. Meanwhile the lower class, led by Zapata and Villa where demanding a land reform to the lower class. When Madero won the presidency in 1912 but he was never able to control the lower class and a year later he was overthrown and executed. In the 1960s when Mexico was going through it growth, factory owners where making all the money and the middle class stated the same. In 1930, Brazil had a revolution led by Getulio Vargas. The liberal revolution represented a victory for the urban class to reform. Vargas created a new constitution that guaranteed the rights of labor, women, and state intervention in...
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...Porfirio Diaz headed his government towards international recognition with characteristics of pragmatism and pure negotiations, avoiding foreign conflicts and handling diplomacy in a consistent approach. He applied the Juarez Doctrine in order to reestablish relationship with nations with whom they had broken diplomacy, based on three principles: 1) to quit treaties and agreements that were signed before, essentially that they renounce to the payment of the loans given to Mexico. 2) Ask the Mexican government to restore relations and 3) celebrate new agreements and treaties in a more fair way for both parts. As we see the path that this regime crosses was of an absolute convenient diplomacy and recognition of the big nations, England, United States and France. The relationship between the regime of Porfirio Diaz and Weetman Pearson is believed that was constituted as a type of a Faustian pact among corrupted elites and greedy foreigners in a conspiracy to steal Mexico’s economic resources. As an interpretation of an informal British imperialism in the nineteenth century we can relate the political and economical context of Victorianism and Porfirian age, in which we confirm that was the golden age for Great Britain in Latin America. Porfirio Díaz Mori was born on September 15th of 1830 in Oaxaca, Oaxaca. He was a liberal politician that became president of Mexico and lasted thirty years, also he was a soldier and a veteran of the Reform War. Weetman Dickinson Pearson was...
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...war, the country was left in a period of belated reform and was in need of rapid industrialization and urban growth to ensure the rest of the world did not leave them behind. For instance, in William H. Beezley’s Judas at the Jockey Club, the most notable examples under the rule of Porfirio Diaz between 1876 and 1910 are explained, amid Mexico’s political and social transformation. Though these transformations ultimately led to Mexican modernization, the reform came at the expense of its people. Whereas the nation’s inhabitants had split into two groups, the wealthy, who favored reform, and the poor, who held traditional methods close. This domestic conflict only made the pressure to implement change more difficult as it became a necessity for survival in the new world. Diaz’s plan to synonymously restore order and change to a broken country thrived upon positive ideals, which were believed to modernize the country as an economic powerhouse through mandatory reform and foreign investments. The country’s social stability and economy predominantly suffered in the post war, and as Diaz rose to power in 1876, the society had divided amongst the elite liberals and the poor conservatives. Diaz along with the elite class supported the industrial...
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...History of Mexican Revolution Anthony Zermeno LALS 262/HIST 262: Latin America Since 1850 April 16, 2016 HISTORY OF MEXICAN REVOLUTION The Mexican Revolution which started in 1910 and ended in 1920, is recognized as the first major political, social, and cultural revolution on the 20th century. It was a war that started when liberals, which are people that believe that the governments action is to achieve equal opportunity and equality for all, and intellectuals began to challenge the regime of dictator Porfirio Diaz, who had been in power from 1876 to 1911, which is a term of 34 years called El Porfiriato, violating the principles and ideals of the Mexican Constitution of 1857. The constitution established individual rights such as freedom of speech; freedom of conscience; freedom of the press; freedom of assembly; and the right to bear arms. It also reaffirmed the abolition of slavery, eliminated debtor prison, and eliminated all forms of cruel and unusual punishment, including the death penalty. As a result of El Porfiriato there is economic crises, anti re-election campaigns, inter-elite alliances crumbled, mobilization of subaltern sectors (peasants, workers, small landholders, etc.). Since so much corruption was taking place a revolution emerged. It was a revolution that was led by different factions, representatives of the poor peasant sector (Emiliano Zapata), poor northern ranchers (Pancho Villa), marginalized provincial middle class people (Alvaro...
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...The roots of the revolution lie in the global dislocations wrought by industrialization and modernization, combined with the local factors of social inequality and the dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz in the last six years of his rule. During the Porfiriato, an expanding Atlantic economy targeted Mexican raw materials for export to the industrializing economies in the United States and Europe. The resultant foreign investments into infrastructure, banking, mining, and agriculture brought impressive material improvements, including the construction of almost fifteen thousand miles of railroad track and the revitalization of the mining industry. But these investments also brought an unprecedented degree of vulnerability to global markets....
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...[Type the document title] Porfirio Diaz : The cause of the Mexican Revolution Jazmin Jimenez 10/14/2016 The Mexican Revolution was a time of skirmishes among the Mexican people, and Porfirio Diaz was a huge reason for that. One of the main causes of the war was the separation of classes; Diaz favored the rich people over the poor, and this caused many people to be angry. Another reason people wanted Porfirio Diaz out of rule is that they held him responsible for the massacre of an entire Chihuahua village called the Tomochic. The last main cause was his denial to give up his presidency; he stayed in power for more than thirty years turning his presidency into a dictatorship. These are the reasons that Porfirio Diaz had the most...
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