Can we, as American citizens, really understand the struggles of immigrants coming to our country? What they lose and what they gain? How our offensive and insensitive words affect them? These questions are answered through the photo album created in this text, full of images from the life of Pablo Salazar, displaying his experiences as an American immigrant from Guatemala. This poem explores the questions presented by utilizing Pablo’s own words and views as answers. Through an intensive interview with him, I delved deeper into the struggles and isolation felt by immigrants and attempted to create a poem that encompassed Pablo’s various internal and external problems. By coupling my creative piece, The Colors of My Flag, with Humanimal by
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This is apparent in Humanimal by Bhanu Kapil, in which the speaker’s experience in India focuses on the citizens of India, and their obsession with her ethnicity. At one moment in the collection, the speaker is persistently asked by a police escort, “Are you Indian?... Madam, are you France? Are you American? I think you are born in a different country” (Kapil 18). The question of ethnicity is reiterated several times because people find it important to classify people with their ethnicity. This focus on ethnicity is paralleled in Pablo’s life and the creative piece. I decided to include the idea that he is torn between associating himself with the “people who share / A country with me, or the people who share / Skin Color” in the poem to display the internal conflict faced by immigrants. Your race and ethnicity become defining characteristics of who you are, whether or not you fit into the stereotypes your place of origin is put into. For instance, people automatically look at Pablo and decide he is Mexican and make racist remarks towards him, characterizing him with the ethnicity others presume him to be. They assume him to be Mexican, and while he is of Latino ethnicity, he finds offense in the automatic assumption that he is from Mexico. If with immigrants, such as the speaker of Humanimal and Pablo, people would stop insisting to assume ethnicity, they would be able to get to know them and see their true
This is apparent in Humanimal by Bhanu Kapil, in which the speaker’s experience in India focuses on the citizens of India, and their obsession with her ethnicity. At one moment in the collection, the speaker is persistently asked by a police escort, “Are you Indian?... Madam, are you France? Are you American? I think you are born in a different country” (Kapil 18). The question of ethnicity is reiterated several times because people find it important to classify people with their ethnicity. This focus on ethnicity is paralleled in Pablo’s life and the creative piece. I decided to include the idea that he is torn between associating himself with the “people who share / A country with me, or the people who share / Skin Color” in the poem to display the internal conflict faced by immigrants. Your race and ethnicity become defining characteristics of who you are, whether or not you fit into the stereotypes your place of origin is put into. For instance, people automatically look at Pablo and decide he is Mexican and make racist remarks towards him, characterizing him with the ethnicity others presume him to be. They assume him to be Mexican, and while he is of Latino ethnicity, he finds offense in the automatic assumption that he is from Mexico. If with immigrants, such as the speaker of Humanimal and Pablo, people would stop insisting to assume ethnicity, they would be able to get to know them and see their true