Citizen Rex!

This post pertains to the opening sequence of “Citizen Rex,” from page 8 to 9.  The reader is first introduced to the nameless metropolis, with its desolate and run down post industrial imagery. In the first panel on page 8, Bloggo is crawling out from under a pile of garbage. The imagery gives the reader that the city Bloggo is living in dystopia. The streets are empty (though it is 3 am), and the building seems lifeless. It’s as if Big Brother, a la “1984,” has imposed a curfew upon all humans forbidding them to walk the night.

In panel two, Bloggo’s face is revealed. His eyebrow is bleeding, his chin is scraped, and his face is smeared with dirt. The primitive nature of the way his face is drawn gives the character an air of universality, as cloud puts it. His face lacks in realistic details but is still very human. The third panel reveals that other people do indeed inhabit the nameless dystopia. Bloggo’s face is full of expression, as opposed to the other figures walking about. The others in the panel appear perfectly symmetrical – almost manufactured. The look of sadness and despair in his eyes is unquestionably human than the robot like beings in the background – almost more robotic than the actual robot in the next panel, whose disembodied head bears more expression than the twins or the goopy looking bloke atop the overpass. In panel five, Bloggo reveals that he is a member of the “filthy” bourgeois class. With his low social status and place in the counterculture as a blogger, he is an underdog, and the reader is forced to identify and sympathize with him immediately. 

What is the intent of portraying Bloggo’s “trashed” robot as being more human like than the strange figures in panel 3?

What is the effect of the setting? Does anyone else get a distinct “Blade Runner” vibe from these opening panels?  

Multi Layered Questions - Viramontes

What line does Viramontes repeat on page 167? What is the significance of this repetition? How does Viramontes explore the stereotype of the single mother Chicano figure?

How is Arlene’s hair color described in paragraph 3? What is the significance of her hair color? How does Viramontes use the image of Miss Clariol to explore the idea of the post-chicana woman in white society?

Journal Post #3 - Public Separateness

     Tomas Rivera’s novella, “…And the Earth Did Not Devour Him” deals with a boy’s desire to find his place in a society that he often feels alienated from. At school he is met with discrimination, embarrassment, and separateness from the other students that his white peers will most likely never experience. One day he decides not to go to class after recalling “how the teacher would spank him for sure because he didn’t know the words.” On another occasion he is sent to the nurse’s office to be examined for lice, because he is Mexican. The boy in Rivera’s story is becoming ever more conscious of what Richard Rodriguez, in his memoir “Aria”, “public separateness.”

     Rodriguez attributes this separateness to students not being forced to learn English, and allowing them, because of bilingual education to continue to speak Spanish in the midst of their English speaking peers. Though this form of bilingualism accommodates speakers of other languages in schools, students will not find the same accommodations after leaving school and entering a society that remains foreign to them. According to Rodriguez, the “great lesson of school” is to teach students that they have a “public identity” and bilingual education delays this because it allows disadvantaged youth to continue speaking their “private language.” This private language is what the student speaks at home. If the private language remains the student’s first language and the public language (English) is not learned, upward mobility in public life will be difficult to come by. Rodriguez states: “The fact is that only in private – with intimates – is separateness from the crowd a perquisite for individuality.” Public separateness does bring people together in private, united by disadvantages in public life.

     That said, the protagonist in Rivera’s story has not fallen prey to bilingual education, as it has yet to be instituted. “…And the Earth Did Not Devour Him,” takes place in the fifties and bilingual education, according to Rodriguez, “was popularized in the seventies.” But he does feel alienated from his peers because of language – he has yet to learn English well enough to function in public life. Teachers try to get him to participate in class by reading but he found it nearly impossible. “When it was my turn to read, I couldn’t. I could hear myself. And I could hear that no words were coming out.” Rodriguez also found himself in this situation: “I continued to mumble… I remained dazed, diffident, afraid.” Both face a silence in public life that sets them apart from the crowd. Silence is a main theme for both writers. The two individuals, Rodriguez, and Rivera’s protagonist gain their individuality from this silence, but this kind of individuality is really just the “public separateness” that Rodriguez eloquently describes.

     Both of these authors write of the trials and tribulations of growing up in a public life that is vastly different from private life.

     In a society that values individuality and diversity, is individuality gained from feeling alienated important to preserve?

Woman Hollering Creek

     Before Cliofilas is bonded with her husband in holy matrimony she is in essence a giddy schoolgirl with a distorted view of the realities of marriage, in love with the idea of pasión. Sandra Cisneros’s internal omniscient narrator gives the reader a window into Cliofilas’s mind (on p.45) with very short and sometimes fragmented sentences to depict Cliofilas’s pre-marital thoughts. “Far away and lovely. Not like Monclova. Coahuia. Ugly.” This indirectly characterizes Cliofilas as an overly excited, and slightly caffeinated, teenager who has lost all ability to think rationally.

      

     Cliofilas also naively sees the town she will move to as a married woman, Seguin, Texas, as an almost magical safety haven of happily ever afters and wealth, compared to her Mexican hometown where she lives with her father and six brothers. She longs for the day that she can move with her perfect husband to Seguin, which she finds to have “a nice sterling ring to it.” Sterling ring has a double meaning here. Not only does Cliofilas think it sounds pretty, but she associates the town with marriage, with a pun on the word ring, and with wealth, in that the ring in question happens to be “sterling.” The following  sentence, “The tinkle of Money,” furthers Cliofilas’s obsession with the idea of wealth and the endless amounts of it that she thinks her Romeo-esque husband will provide her with. It should also be noted that there is yet another pun on the word “tinkle” referencing the motif of the creek that will become embedded in Cliofilas’s harsh marital reality in the near future.

     Cliofilas again gives the reader a glimpse of her disconnect with reality when she muses upon the outfits she will wear once she is married which will be just “like the women on the tele.” The telenovellas provide Cliofilas with a camp and bombastically over exaggerated depiction of love, marriage, and life. Her dependence on the telenovella to form her opinions and ideas of reality again depict Cliofilas as an immature child, set up for disappointment in married life because of her expectations that her reality will somehow intersect with the reality of a fictitious character from a soap opera. Later in the story, when things start to sour for her, Cliofilas still uses the telenovella as a lens. She says that her husband “doesn’t look like the men on the telenovellas,” and later that her life is become like a telenovella “only now the episodes got sadder and sadder.”

      

     Cliofilas even concludes this passage hoping that she will make her childhood friend (and later, bridesmaid) Chela jealous. It is almost as if Cliofilas is caught up in the romanticism of the idea of marriage, designing a scrapbook with plans for her future engagement, sitting on the floor of her bedroom of her parent’s house, dreaming of the day her prince will leap off of the pages of her favorite fairy tale. She obviously has a few innocent, yet immature, delusions.   

      

     Which brings me to my question: Are all delusions about marriage bad? Can escaping into alternate realities, (such as the telenovellas) temporarily, be beneficial to a person?  

Who's Joaquin?

In his free verse poem “I Am Joaquin,” Rodolfo Gonzales brings to life a man who finds himself in a predicament, an internal battle of identity. Joaquin, forced to choose between a full stomach and retaining his cultural identity, puts the weight of his entire heritage on his shoulders. He has “come a long way to nowhere,” which is not, in his mind, what his “own people” so valiantly struggled for. Joaquin feels as though he has betrayed his history, and in turn, the peoples that have made up his Mexican cultural identity – his blood. 

Joaquin is Mexican. What does that mean?

Joaquin answers this question through listing figures in Mexican history: Aztec rulers, Mayan princes, priests, revolutionaries, all who made Mexico what it is today. These figures make up Joaquin’s cultural background and fought for his freedom – as a Mexican. He “rode with Pancho Villa” and had “killed and been killed” only to squander it all and move to the United States. It is almost as if Joaquin thinks of himself as a prisoner of war, someone “whose pride and courage could not surrender with indignity their country’s flag to strangers,” and now “bleed[s] in some smelly cell” (America).

Joaquin cuts out the figurative historical statements and begins speaking of the present situation in America, where Mexicans “lengthen the line at the welfare door” and “fill the jails with crime.” His “land is lost,” and his “culture has been raped” by the United States. This section of the poem takes on an extremely bitter tone using descriptive words like “stinking,” “mutilated,” and “vicious.” This the tone of an oppressed man ready to fight, which is exactly what Joaquin resolves to do. Towards the end, Joaquin reintroduces himself: “I am Joaquin. I must fight and win this struggle for my sons, and they must know me for who I am.” Joaquin is a Mexican, he has endured the Europeans and “toils” and “slavery” and “the suburbs of bigotry.” Here, Joaquin takes the tone of a warrior, as if he did actually ride with Pancho Villa.

He lists off different racial terms that Mexicans have been referred to as, the last being “Chicano,” a Mexican who lives in America. Joaquin resolves that he is still Mexican, no matter where he lives, or what he calls himself – he “refuses to be absorbed.” The end of the poem takes on the tone of a rousing speech, on that a military general could be giving to his troops before going in to battle, ending with the cry: “I SHALL ENDURE! I WILL ENDURE.”

By the end of the poem, Joaquin has won his internal battle by accepting who he is and embracing his history. He is a Mexican, someone who has endured oppression and prevailed numerous times. He resolves to fight for his culture, just as Cuauhtemoc did, just as Pancho Villa did, just as Hidalgo did. Because that is who he is. He is Joaquin.  

Though difficult for me to relate to as a semi well off and privileged white person from the suburbs, I found Gonzales’s poem to be extremely effective and very well executed. The protagonist is dejected but gains inspiration and the wherewithal to persevere through his history.He finds strength in his heritage.

How often do we as Americans do this? What is the difference between finding strength in heritage and being nostalgic?

Theme for English 202

The instructor said,

When you’re at home tonight

Write a page if you’d like.

The words you write must be true,

And they must come from out of you.

I couldn’t sleep last night and had no good reason for it,

but I did save my apartment from burning to a pile of glowing embers.

Our dryer is broken; its timer forgot how to keep time

and my roommate forgot to keep this fact inside her mind.

She went to bed around 10 and let the machine run rampant.

Insomnia being my only companion at 1 am, I found it odd

to not hear the sound of perfect silence, instead hearing the low rumble

of a tired appliance built during the early Clinton years.

At last I arose and opened the dryer door, finding the items within to be quite dry,

quite dry indeed.

I then went back to bed and planned the morning’s lecture.

Did that count? No?

My biggest fear is going bald.

My favorite color is blue, and the teal color that the Mariners wear on occasion.

My shirt felt a bit too baggy today.

My morning consisted of two fried eggs, and a bit of songwriting.

I bought the new Wilco record on vinyl this morning, but I’m not really a vinyl snob.

I just think it’s cool.

I see intellectual douchebags and wonder if that’s what others see when they look at me.

I can be judgmental, negative, and piercingly cold.

I try to be charming.

I contain multitudes, or something like that.

The sun has now swallowed Lummi Island with the glint

of its reflection on the bay but the view from my deck is beautiful still.

I feel fortunate.

And thankful.

And lucky.

I once heard a wise man say:

Write it and it shall be true.

This is my theme for English 202