Monday, 12 June 2006:

Poetry reader: Gordon Lewis

Poem: Pat Mora, “Immigrants,” UA 119

According to critical essays in the Dictionary of Literary Biography and Contemporary Authors, sources for much of the commentary herein, Mora is one of the most distinguished and widely read Hispanic writers.  She is a third generation immigrant, raised and educated in El Paso, Texas, in a home that included parents and a maternal grandmother and aunt, a storyteller.  This close knit family has influenced her writing.  Her work is widely included in anthologies and six of her poems are included in our text.

Her own life is the model immigrant story.  Her grandparents on both sides left Mexico @ 1916 to flee the chaos relating to the Mexican revolution led by Pancho Villa when her father was 4 years old.  Her father developed a successful newspaper circulation business, earning $100 a week in the depression during a time when teachers were paid $3500 a year.  He attended business college, was employed by Bausch and Lomb, became an optician and eventually opened his own optical business.  Patricia earned both a BA and an MA at the University of Texas-El Paso, taught in the public schools and the community college, and eventually moved into administrative positions at the college.  She currently is a full time lecturer and writer and married to a professor of anthropology at the University of Cincinnati.  They have a summer home in Santa Fe.

According to Kanellos, from the University of Houston and author of the DLB essay, there are several themes that permeate and unite Mora’s work and the major theme is the metaphor of “Borders,” which is also the title of her second poetry collection.  Mora’s borders are both physical and philosophical and in her third collection, Communion, she extends this metaphor to include recognition of the similarities between Chicano and other minority/immigrant cultures in the United States and marginalized people of poor countries around the world.

Objective 2 Assimilation

As we examine the poem, “Immigrants,” Mora’s themes and Objective 2 of the course are seen in line 9 with the inclusion of both the Spanish and Polish immigrant, i.e., all immigrants facing the challenge of assimilation.  In stage 4 of objective 2, assimilation to the dominant culture, these concepts are reflected in the poem by the American flag, hot dogs and apple pie, children’s names of Bill and Daisy, football and blonde dolls with blue eyes, also addressed by Cisneros in “Barbie-Q.”

Objective 4 also addresses signs of the dominant culture to which immigrants assimilate.

The concluding lines are all about assimilation.  “Will ‘they’ (the dominant culture) ‘like’ our boy, our girl, our fine American boy, our fine American girl?”  The immigrant strives for acceptance.

Objective 3 Immigrant/Minority/Color

The portion of objective 3 that is addressed in this poem is the color code.  There are obviously numerous philosophical borders implied by the poem, but the physical border of color is mentioned in line 11, “dark parent bed,” and the psychological or philosophical border in 11 & 12, “that dark parent fear.”

Discussion Questions

1. Is the feeling you get from this poem, Hope for the future, Pain over lost identity, or something else?

2. The parents may be Spanish or Polish and their goal is ‘acceptance’ of their children by the dominant culture.  The parents may be “dark,” brown or black.  To what degree will this impact, if at all, on whether their children will be “liked?” 

3. Will the children be more likely to be “liked/accepted” if they are:  Spanish?  Polish?

4. Viewing this poem from the immigrant view of the Hispanic author, the parent’s goal for their children is be liked/accepted by the dominant culture.  If the author viewed their status as a minority group, would this affect the goals that the parents hold for their children?

The question for these three class periods is how does the Hispanic literature resemble or differ from the immigrant or the minority narrative.

This poem, “Immigrants,” appears to resemble immigrant literature.  However, in other writings, Mora refers to skin color as a border separating Mexicans and Anglos.  She has written that a Mexican immigrant is “an American to Mexicans,” and “a Mexican to Americans.”

Another quote of her published in Hispanic Writers is, “I write, in part, because Hispanic perspectives need to be part of our literary heritage.”  This statement is an acknowledgement of a minority status.

One of my favorite quotes from Mora, for teachers, is:  “To transform our traditions wisely, we need to know them, be inspired and saddened by them, choose for ourselves what to retain.  We can prize the elements of the past as we persist in demanding and creating change.”

Works Cited

Kanellos, Nicolas.  “Pat Mora.”  Dictionary of Literary Biography.  1999.  Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 209: Chicano Writers, Third Series.  Eds. Francisco A. Lomeli and Carl R. Shirley.  Detroit:  Gale Research, 1999.  160-63.  Literature Resource Center.  Gale Group.   10 June 2006.

      http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRc?vrsn=3&OP=
contains&locID=txshrpub

“Pat Mora.”  Contemporary Authors Online.  22 Oct 2002.  Detroit:  Gale.  Literature Resource Center.  Gale Group.  10 June 2006.

      http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRc?vrsn=3&OP=
contains&locID=txshrpub