Literary or Style Objectives (5 & 6) 

Objective 5: Minority Narratives

• “Narratives” are stories or plots, a sequence of events in which people act and speak in time.

• Narratives concern not only how a writer tells a story, but also how an audience receives, processes, and makes meaning of it.

• A cultural narrative is a collective story that unifies or directs a community--for example, The American Dream for the USA, or particular minority narratives that reflect an ethnic group's experience or range of expression.

• Following Minority-Culture Objective 1, Minority Narratives differ from the dominant “American Dream” narrative—which involves voluntary participation, forgetting the past, and individuals or nuclear families.

• Instead, minority narratives generally involve involuntary participation, reconnecting to a broken past, and traditional, extended, or alternative families.

Tabular summary of Objective 5:
contrasts between the dominant culture's "American Dream" narrative and minority narratives

5a. African American alternative narrative: “The Dream”

• "The Dream" resembles but is not identical to "The American Dream."

• Whereas the American Dream emphasizes immediate individual success, "the Dream" factors in setbacks, the need to rise again, and group dignity.

5b. Native American Indian alternative narrative: "Loss and Survival"

• Dominant / immigrant culture leaves its past behind to gain rights and opportunities--the American Dream.

•  For Indians, the American Dream of immigration is the American Nightmare, creating an undeniable narrative of loss: the native people were once “the Americans” but lost most of their people, land, rights, and opportunities.

• Despite these terrible losses, Native Americans defy the myth of "the vanishing Indian," choosing to "survive," sometimes in faith that the dominant culture will eventually destroy itself, and the forests and buffalo will return.

• The American dominant culture usually writes only half of the Indians' story, romanticizing their loss (e. g., The Last of the Mohicans) and ignoring the Indians who adapt and survive.

5c. Mexican American narrative: “The Ambivalent Minority” or Third Way

• "Ambivalent" means having "mixed feelings" or contradictory attitudes.

• Mexican Americans as a group may feel or exemplify mixed feelings about whether they are a minority group that will remain separate or an immigrant culture that will assimilate.

• As individuals or families who come to America for economic gain but suffer social dislocation, Mexican Americans resemble the dominant immigrant culture.

• On the other hand, much of Mexico's historic experience with the USA resembles the experience of the Native Americans: much of the United States, including Texas, was once Mexico.

• Does a Mexican who moves from Juarez to El Paso truly immigrate? In any case, it’s not just another immigrant story.

Objective 6: Minorities and Language

To study minority writers' and speakers' experiences with literacy & influence on literature and language.

6a. To regard literacy as the primary code of modern existence and a key or path to empowerment. (See obj. 3 on assimilation / resistance)

6b. To emphasize how all speakers and writers use literary devices such as narrative and figures of speech.

6c. To discover literature's power to express the minority voice and vicariously share minority experience.

6d. To assess minorities' status in the "canon" or curriculum of what is read and taught in schools (

6e. To note variations of standard English by minority writers and speakers.

6f. To translate the "Dominant-Minority" relation to philosophical or syntactic categories of "Subject & Object," in which the "subject" is self-determining and active in terms of "voice and choice," while the "object" is acted upon, passive, or spoken for rather than acting and speaking.