In his poem Bully, Martin Espada writes about colonization during the Spanish-American War and the effects of desegregation in a Boston school dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt. Through the use of visual imagery and irony between the title and the poem, Espada compares Roosevelt to a bully and “brown children” (line 14) to the victim that invades and changes the school in order to highlight the theme of a new, diverse American generation undoing the damages of the past.

Espada utilizes strong visual imagery to help the reader recall the old glory of the Theodore Roosevelt statue as it watches over the institution and is destroyed by the “brown children” (14) that enter the school doors. He dramatizes the atrocious effects of school desegregation by describing the children’s animalistic behavior and pairing it with the color of their skin, which …show more content…
However, as the statue becomes more colored, so does the school; “the Roosevelt school / is pronounced Hernández” (9-10) and children paint the Roosevelt statue with “parrot-brilliant colors” (26) to further represent the mix of cultures when a school desegregates. The use of “shoved” in line 20 identifies Roosevelt, a white man, with a bully, and the image is further perpetuated by his motive of “eugenic spite” (20). The colored children, then, are the obvious victims of Roosevelt’s hate because they ruin American eugenics, which additionally associates him with the picture of Nazis and their idea of a superior race. The nostalgia of American imperialism described in the first stanza turns into an act of oppression towards the imperialized countries during