Research Paper Lorna Dee Cervantes is one of the major Latina poetic voices writing in English literature. At least half a dozen of her poems have been reprinted widely. Although she has written on a variety of topics, including a number of love poems, she is best known for those poems that define the situation for Mexican Americans at the end of the twentieth century as well as poems that are feminist and political. More than any other poet, Cervantes describes what it is like to live in two cultural worlds or between them and the tensions and difficulties such a limbo creates for a woman. For this reason, I will demonstrate how Lorna Dee Cervantes shows in her works the difficulties of growing up in two cultures, using her poem “Refugee …show more content…
Language serves as a sort of psychic glue through which individuals become part of a culture and society. In addition, without the cementing factor of the Spanish language, the poetic subject, like the wet cornstarch in the poem, only slips past her patrimony instead of becoming part of it. Just as women in general are alienated from the primary position of subject in the logic of patriarchal language and relegated to the objectified position of "Other," the poetic subject finds herself floating in an interstitial realm between two cultures. Cherrie Moraga, who herself is half Anglo and half Chicana, explains the dilemma of being brought up to deny the "colored" part of one's ancestry: "From all of this, I experience, daily, a huge disparity between what I was born into and what I was to become."(17) As a person of color, the poetic subject of "Refugee Ship" naturally experiences alienation from mainstream United States society. The fact that she was socialized by an Anglo mother and grew up without the Spanish language prevents her from feeling included in the Chicano community. Her fragmented self-image prevents the poetic subject from feeling truly at home in either culture. This dynamic is expressed in terms of a person in eternal exile, "a captive aboard the refugee