“Stop!” Carla cried. “Please stop.”
“Eh-stop!” they mimicked her. “Plees eh-stop.”
They were disclosing her secret shame: her body was changing. The girl she had been back home in Spanish was being shed. In her place—almost as if the boys’ ugly words and taunts had the power of spells—was a hairy, breast-budding grownup no one would ever love.
Every day, Carla set out on their long journey to school with a host of confused feelings. First of all there was this body whose daily changes she noted behind the closed bathroom door until one o her sisters knocked that Carla’s turn was over. How she wished she could wrap her body up the way she’d heard Chinese girls had their feet bound so they wouldn’t grow big. She would stay herself, a quick, skinny girl with brown eyes and a braid down her back, a girl she had just begun to feel she could get things in this world.
But then, too, Carla felt relieved to be setting out towards her very own school in her proper grade away from the crowd-ing that was her family of four girls too close in age. She could come home with stories of what happened that day and not have a chorus of three naysayers to correct her. But she also felt dread. There, in the playground, they would be waiting her for—the gang of four or five boys, blond, snotty-nosed, freckled—faced. They looked bland and unknowable, the way all Americans did. Their faced betrayed no sign of human warmth. Their eyes were too clear for cleaving, intimate looks. Their pale bodies did not seem real but were like costume they were wearing as they played the part of her persecutors (Alvarez 153-154).
In response to “Multifaceted Nature of Immigration,” your close reading essay on the passage you chose from the short story “Trespass” from How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez:
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with your adept analysis of the passage you chose from “Trespass.” Your pointing out Alvarez’s use of words with negative connotations such as “bland,” “unknowable,” and “pale” (Alvarez 154) to describe how the white boys that tormented her appeared to Carla is perceptive and accurate.
One portion of the passage that I felt could be slightly analyzed more was the first paragraph where the boys expose Carla’s growing body. This act of exposure and examination by the boys reflects how immigrants are scrutinized by those living in the area to which they have immigrated to. The complete humiliation and shame felt by Carla, and by the audience through sympathizing with Carla, is the same that Alvarez, and most, if not all, immigrants, especially those at an impressionable age, would feel under the examination of the natives and their denouncing of the immigrants’ traits.
Also, the boys throwing stones at Carla is extremely symbolic. First of all, the boys throw stones at Carla’s feet. In the context of the short story, this is so the boys would leave no mark on Carla by their abuse, much like how verbal abuse leaves no physical marker. More importantly, however, the boys are throwing stones at Carla’s feet, the feet which carry her to school, the feet that she stands upright on. The boys, through their abuse and mockery, are destroying Carla’s foundation. This is much reflected in what most immigrants face. Their identity and their culture is, in many cases, looked down upon by those already living in the area. This causes the immigrants to stumble, their foundation to crumble. Also, across many cultures, stoning would be the preferred way of execution as a way to punish a sin. The boys throwing stones at Carla symbolically represented this killing of who she is—Hispanic, a “sin” in the boys minds simply by virtue of being different. Through this abuse, this crumbling of her foundation, and this murder of her identity, Alvarez has expertly woven together an analog to what many immigrants face.