Blog #1- The New Latin Nation

       In chapters 1-8, 14-16, Piri shares his experiences growing up in New York City as a "Puerto Rican." I put that in quotations because he soon discovers that he is in fact African American. He always knew he was different somehow because he was always darker than his bothers and sister but, no one in the family wanted to accept their "blackness" everyone believed they were "white Puerto Ricans." Going through Piri's young age to his semi-adult age was very interesting. His becoming "hombre" phase and fighting with family. I wonder is this actually happens in real-life.. Do young Puerto Rican boys feel the need to become "hombre" by doing what Piri and his friends did? Do they fight each other and prove their masculinity this way? Is it only Puerto Ricans, do others do this?        I also found the conversations that went on between Piri and his father as well as the conversation with José. To see what his brother thought and ...

     Rosario's personal essay talks about how to identify oneself, in this case how she identifies with herself while discussing the many different ways which she can identify as. She gives her readers this idea of not being associated as "American" because the term American, according to her is slippery, transitory, and no geology, anthropology. She cannot seem to figure her identity out because she sees both African and Dominican inside of her. She gets called African American, Latina, Dominican and she does not understand why the different labels or a list as she says.      The United States and pretty much everywhere else have created these ideas of Assimilation and "the way things are supposed to be". In traditional Latino/a culture, (sometimes) it is rude for the women to speak about anything considered "manly" like working or politics. Women are supposed to cook clean, do their work and the extended always asks about new boyfriends or if they ...

Both the poem and Anzaldua's piece connect to each other on the basic of how language is a huge part of our lives and how we can use it in different ways. Spanish and english, spanglish. They both used these languages in their won way to communicate to their audience. Anzaldúa further explains how she's used it in her life constantly as well as other languages to perform her best during everyday situations. She also talks about her life being a chicana lesbian and going through life as a schoolteacher and the struggles of racism and oppression she faces while being apart of America.

Many Americans take the Latina/o community for granted and blame everything on their community. They tell us that we are responsible for taking away their jobs but, what they don't know and understand is that "we" do this and we work as hard as we can in this country to provide a better life for our family and for ourselves. In Pedro A. Noguera's essay he examined Miguel's life and analyzed what could be better in his life and really showed that most Latinos/as need to think outside the box and create opportunities for themselves. The documentary "Precious Knowledge" was a great example of Latinos/as creating opportunities and fighting for what is right for themselves! Those teachers who fought with their students to help them and encourage them to learn about their culture and not just their own culture are amazing role models and we as watchers of the documentary can see that those teachers not only cared about what they taught their students, but actu...

Today's reading by, Maria Cristina Garcia discusses a more inside look about immigration and the Latino/x community's immigration from all sorts of places. I thought it was very informative and astonishing to see all the different numbers of how many of each "latino/x culture" has immigrated to the U.S under harsh conditions and received so much approval or not so much approval. I thought Garcia's constant reminder of proving that there aren't just "latino/x" communities but rather that there is an enormous amount of culture within that label and how they should be treated with respect to each of their needs and look at them as an equal in terms of knowing that they all exist. We can connect this to the other reading from last week about Indigenous people seeking help to learn Spanish so they can learn english. We can make this connection by finally saying we realize that not all "Spanish" people speak Spanish and the simple fact there is m...

What I found most interesting about Alejandro Portes' essay was the way he described Latin Americans and how he basically agreed with the stereotypes put upon the community. He criticizes Americans in saying that they do not account and show representation for all so called "Latino/x" people but, in turn makes the bold statement that there is a common culture grounded on religion and language. This is very hypocritical because we know or it is assumed that we all should know that all Latino or hispanic" people do not speak Spanish. It should also be known that not all Latinos go to a catholic church. Other than that, this essay was more or less things I had known about the struggles in the Latino/x community and it is just still chilling to see facts and statistics discussing either racism or whether they've immigrated and such.