Prose Passage #1: Carla

     Every day on the playground and in the halls of her new school, a gang of boys chased after her, calling her names, some of which she had heard before from the old lady neighbor in the apartment they had rented in the city. Out of sight of the nuns, the boys pelted Carla with stones, aiming them at her feet so there would be no bruises. “Go back to where you came from, you dirty spic!” One of them, standing behind her in line, pulled her blouse out of her skirt where it was tucked in and lifted it high. “No titties,” he snickered. Another yanked down her socks, displaying her legs, which had begun growing soft, dark hairs. “Monkey legs” he yelled to his pals. 

     “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).

Poetry and Close Reading Response: Legal Alien

Legal Alien

Pat Mora

Bi-lingual, Bi-cultural,
able to slip from "How's life?"
to "Me'stan volviendo loca,"
able to sit in a paneled office
drafting memos in smooth English,
able to order in fluent Spanish
at a Mexican restaurant,
American but hyphenated,
viewed by Anglos as perhaps exotic,
perhaps inferior, definitely different,
viewed by Mexicans as alien,
(their eyes say, "You may speak
Spanish but you're not like me")
an American to Mexicans
a Mexican to Americans
a handy token
sliding back and forth
between the fringes of both worlds
by smiling
by masking the discomfort
of being pre-judged
Bi-laterally.

Poetry and Close Reading Response: Bilingual Sestina

Bilingual Sestina
Julia Alvarez

 Some things I have to say aren't getting said
in this snowy, blonde, blue-eyed, gum chewing English,
dawn's early light sifting through the persianas closed
the night before by dark-skinned girls whose words 
evoke cama, aposento, suenos in nombres
from that first word I can't translate from Spanish.

Gladys, Rosario, Altagracia--the sounds of Spanish
wash over me like warm island waters as I say
your soothing names: a child again learning the nombres
of things you point to in the world before English
turned sol, tierra, cielo, luna to vocabulary words--
sun, earth, sky, moon--language closed

like the touch-sensitive morivivir. whose leaves closed 
when we kids poked them, astonished.  Even Spanish
failed us when we realized how frail a word 
is when faced with the thing it names.  How saying
its name won't always summon up in Spanish or English
the full blown genii from the bottled nombre.

Gladys, I summon you back with your given nombre
to open up again the house of slatted windows closed
since childhood, where palabras left behind for English
stand dusty and awkward in neglected Spanish.
Rosario, muse of el patio, sing in me and through me say
that world again, begin first with those first words

you put in my mouth as you pointed to the world--
not Adam, not God, but a country girl numbering
the stars, the blades of grass, warming the sun by saying
 el sol as the dawn's light fell through the closed
persianas from the gardens where you sang in Spanish,
Esta son las mananitas, and listening, in bed, no English
yet in my head to confuse me with translations, no English

doubling the world with synonyms, no dizzying array of words,
--the world was simple and intact in Spanish
awash with colores, luz, suenos, as if the nombres
were the outer skin of things, as if words were so close
to the world one left a mist of breath on things by saying

their names, an intimacy I now yearn for in English--
words so close to what I meant that I almost hear my Spanish
blood beating, beating inside what I say en ingles.

Works Cited