The process of immigration has as many perspectives as it does joys and challenges. While we often read, watch, or hear about immigration from the perspective of immigrants themselves, the story does not start or stop with them. This paper uses José Martí's "Our America", Ernesto Galarza's Barrio Boy, and Jesús Colón's "Grandma, Please Don't Come!" to examine how the experience of immigration shapes the perspectives of those both inside and outside of the experience itself, and how these perspectives shape their responses to the immigration process. The first piece, José Martí's 1891 essay “Our America”, looks at immigration from an unusual perspective: the perspective of the native people already inhabiting the land being migrated to. Martí
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In a letter from a concerned grandchild to his set-on-America grandmother, Colón makes a case for his grandmother to stay in her home country of Puerto Rico and not get entangled in the complicated net of immigrant life in New York City. Similarly to Galarza’s autobiography, the crux of the problem lies in the duality of Colón’s grandmother’s life in her familiar Puerto Rican village and the demanding lifestyle of New York, which is nice only if, for example, one is “willing and able to go down five flights of stairs two or three times a day” (500). Colón is illustrating the fact that while the desire to make a better life is valuable, his grandmother’s choice to move to America may not be the answer to that. Using his own lived experiences to describe new experiences in America, from “the real physical burden of 20 additional pounds of clothing on your body when you have to go out during the winter” (500), to the much more pernicious shouts of “‘Why don’t you talk United States?’” (540), Colón warns his grandmother of just what a shock the transition from Puerto Rico to New York would be. He, unlike Martí, is the outsider, and unlike Galarza, is put in the position of trying to protect new immigrants from the perils he himself has already faced. Colón’s response to immigration is (literally) weather-beaten and resigned. All he can do now, after his own harrowing experiences, is ask his grandmother not to come to America and experience the same
In a letter from a concerned grandchild to his set-on-America grandmother, Colón makes a case for his grandmother to stay in her home country of Puerto Rico and not get entangled in the complicated net of immigrant life in New York City. Similarly to Galarza’s autobiography, the crux of the problem lies in the duality of Colón’s grandmother’s life in her familiar Puerto Rican village and the demanding lifestyle of New York, which is nice only if, for example, one is “willing and able to go down five flights of stairs two or three times a day” (500). Colón is illustrating the fact that while the desire to make a better life is valuable, his grandmother’s choice to move to America may not be the answer to that. Using his own lived experiences to describe new experiences in America, from “the real physical burden of 20 additional pounds of clothing on your body when you have to go out during the winter” (500), to the much more pernicious shouts of “‘Why don’t you talk United States?’” (540), Colón warns his grandmother of just what a shock the transition from Puerto Rico to New York would be. He, unlike Martí, is the outsider, and unlike Galarza, is put in the position of trying to protect new immigrants from the perils he himself has already faced. Colón’s response to immigration is (literally) weather-beaten and resigned. All he can do now, after his own harrowing experiences, is ask his grandmother not to come to America and experience the same