Student Zone

“A man can’t have pride and give up his rights”. That quote represents our main character in “Look on the Bright Side”. His slum landlord, Mrs.Kevovian raises the rent by “only sixty some-odd bones” about 2 months too early. He is determined not to pay the illegal rent increase. His wife offers Mrs. Kevovian the accurate amount of rent but she refuses. He estimates it would take three months before they go to court, and decides to let the money sit in the bank until then. Around this same time he’s laid off from work, and his last few paychecks bounce. Considering his time off from work, a big income tax check he’s expecting, and unemployment checks, he decides “it was a good time for a vacation”. On their way home from Baja he’s hassled by an annoying custom officer. Considering the “B grade marijuana” and liquor he lied about having, he shuts up and pays the penalties. Back home on their first trip to eviction court, Mrs. Kevovian lawyer offers to drop the charges as long as the family pays the back rent. Our character wants a better deal and refuses the offer. The lawyers drop those charges and file new ones. Our character is relieved. He didn’t get the big income tax check he was expecting and still didn’t have a job. On their second trip to court he won! The judge subtracted 20% of the debt and ordered the rest to be paid. Mrs. Kevovian never came for the money, which they didn’t have anyway, and a lawyer told the family to expect the sheriff in 10 days to evict them. The family had a garage sale and he sent the wife and kids to stay with family until he got stable again. While job searching he came across a painting job and decided to do research at the library. He was a few hours early and sat on a pissy bench to kill time. Shortly after a man named John joined him. John fed the pigeons and talked about his problems with his SSI check, the hotel he lived in, and how people are no good. Our character thought “he had those kinds of troubles but seemed pretty intelligent otherwise”. After John left the library still wasn’t open. Since he was tired and got use to the smell of the bench he decided to lie down and take a nap. He thought “just until the library opened”.
In Gomez-Pena “Freefalling toward a Borderless Future" he uses humor to get his political ideas across. He presents a world “beyond science fiction” with Gringofarians, Mixteco pilgrims, and yuppie tribes. Gomez-Pena utopian world sounds like fun. Borders are erased, stereotypes become a melting pot, and “AIDS warriors remind us all of the true priorities in life”.
Response #1
The quote reflects all three of the authors perfectly. I think it’s close minded to just relate the quote to something great Indian or Mexican writers do. Rather it should be looked at as the trademark of any great writer. Alexie does one trick after another. Whether James talks or not, is that a representation of the lost identity of the Indians? Is Gilb character really fighting for justice or creating a clever way to get out of his family and financial responsibilities? We would never know the true secrets of his heart. Gomez-Pena presents his idea in a manner to trick the white eye, white-America maybe, because they would proclaim him a national threat, a Mexican Taliban.
Response #2
Literary writing or plain political argument? In “Chicanost…” where Gomez-Pena says “my literature is as simple as a newscast” relates more to just being truth than simplicity. Although his writing has literary worth. I wouldn’t declare it literary writing. He is a performance artist, who is to be experienced not read. Unlike novels that are easily accessible and digested, performance art can’t be re- experience easily and a “reader” has a small amount of time to digest everything.
Are writers like Gomez-Pena and Alexie cleverly igniting a revolution to change our current political system?

Dagoberto Gilb’s story, “Look on the Bright Side” is about the struggles of a working-class guy trying to maintain his dignity while disputing a rental issue with his slumlord. She has decided to illegally raise his rent and the narrator claims he lives in a rat and rodent infested apartment. He protests that until the landlady controls the pest invasion, he won’t give her another dollar. The narrator is a family man who has been laid off from his job and living off of his unemployment benefits. So he has already had his pride humiliated. Although, he is out of work, he still manages to save the money he needs to pay the rent and provide for his family. This guy acts just as Alexie's narrator describes his craft: "That's how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic …you will never find out my secrets and I'll never tell you " (125). They create an illusion of who they really are to fit this social standard or just to “fit in.” A man is supposed to be strong and support his family, but how can he do it when his world is crumbling? The trick is to fool the outside world, and protect what you are hiding inside. The landlady dispute ends up in court, where the narrator has to defend himself. He needs to paint an image of himself to the court. The lawyer defending the landlady offers several opportunities to settle the case, but the narrator never backs down. Eventually, the court rule in his favor and his perseverance prevails.

Aside the litigation, this guy takes his family out of the country to Baja for a vacation, creating another illusion of a model American family. Although he seems to be another “misfit,” his plights are common and humbling, especially when the Customs Agent is grilling him upon his return to the states. He seems to be driving in the slowest lane in life. I think most people can empathize. It is not enough to be a good person and hard worker. Someone will always be there to try to knock you down. The least you can do is maintain your self-respect. “The way I see it, a man can have all the money in the world but if he can’t keep his self-respect, he don’t have shit.” (Gilb 3) These ideas of survival instincts are omnipresent in the next story. Alexie’s story promotes a the tribal motto of the Spokane Indians, “we don’t have the right to die for each other and that we should be living for each other instead.” (Alexie 128)

“Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother Is Alive And Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation,” is a short story about a 20-something year-old, drunk, Indian man who becomes the guardian of a small child, “named ------------ which is unpronounceable… we just call him James.” In 1967, Frank Many Horses and his family were trapped in a burning house. Frank threw his infant son James from the second floor window. The narrator tried to save James from the fall, but didn’t make it. Although James was on fire as he fell and hit the ground, he didn’t cry. As a matter of fact this child never cried, and he never talks. The narrator raises James, worried that there is something wrong with him. The doctors tell the narrator the child is fine, he says “but I see in his eyes something and I see in his eyes a voice, a whole new set of words.” (Alexie 115) He is saying that James is an insightful child, as he absorbs the world around him. James words are unnecessary he speaks with his eyes. James doesn’t say a word or cry a whimper for several years.

Eventually, James speaks and spews out knowledge and advice to his guardian. This is an affirmation to the Native Indian belief that Indian “kids are born adults”, that their children are wise beyond their years. James is sort of this super kid character who is wise and strong, not an average seven-year old kid. That was his gift to the guardian, with no words he was a son, with many words he is now a friend.

The last entry is 1974 when the narrator and James at the World’s Fair in Spokane, where they notice an Indian statue among the other world flags. The Indian statue is symbolic of their culture. It is “telling the crowd we have to take care of the earth because it is our mother.” The narrator confirms his belief that his son, James will always be there for him. It goes back to what James said, “you and I don’t have the right to die for each other and that we should be living for each other instead.” (Alexie 128)

Question: In Alexie’s story, perhaps the characters philosophies on life can explain the superhuman side to the Indian culture? The narrator’s resilience to the intense pain he is feeling as he walks home with a broken leg. James’ spoken wisdom compliments his intensity as an infant. These guys are depicted as stereotypes in Native Indian culture. But do they create an illusion, a mask, just like any other human being? Don’t we all wear social masks to cover up our true feelings? Aren’t these are survival techniques? Or just a conscience way of living as the Natives did?

Guillermo Gómez-Peña’ s work feels like a Mexican news reporter with heavy political views. He is a performance artist and it is hard to feel the satirical comedy from a heavy piece of writing. His politics are made universal in “News From Aztlan Liberado,” he describes the Americas with “Our Alaskan hair, Our Canadian Head, Our U.S. torso, Mexican gentiles and Caribbean sperm.” He is saying this continent is a melting pot of all these cultures; we are a piece of each other. Further driving home the point that our countries must unite. We need to live for each other and take care of our land.

Michael ManyEssays, Gringofarian At Large

Sherman Alexie’s “Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother Is Alive And Well On The Spokane Indian Reservation” begins in a Washington Indian reservation in 1966. It’s Christmas season, on the eve of Rosemary MorningDove’s faux-virgin birth to James. The nameless main character, a young Indian man at age 19, witnesses James’ birth and saves his life the next year. Rosemary and Frank ManyHorses’ house caught on fire, and desperately Frank tossed James out of the upstairs window to be caught––almost––by the main character. James’ parents pass away at the hospital leaving the main character to chivalrously, at the age of twenty, to adopt the boy. For the coming years, the main character describes the mediocrity of his life contained primarily in basketball, binge-drinking, and invariable romances with Suzy Song. In the interim between mundane acts, he reports James’ progress in growing up. Oddly as he finds though, James will not speak, cry, or utter any sort of sound at all; his muted actions transcending speech, “…but I see in his eyes something and I see in his eyes a voice and I see in his eyes a whole new set of words.”

The main character’s “leg explodes” during a basketball game, rendering his knee useless. His drinking increases, landing him in AA to avoid losing James. Being on the wagon proves to be an arduous task; the temptation is always lurking. James begins to speak at the age of 7, gushing out prophetic, philosophical jargon to those around him––the main character being the last. The story ends as they drive to the World’s Fair.

Response and Answer to Question 1:

I appreciated the way Alexie purposefully glazed the text over with an almost juvenile style of delivery, but cleverly inserted thematic/literary gems along the way; an overtly subtle guise to lure the reader into a “monotone-analytical-state”. It’s like a boxer playing coy, allowing his opponent to get careless and then knocking him out with unseen vigor. This style in effect is the manifestation of the protagonist’s quote, “That’s how I do his life sometimes…” (125). Weaving in and out of the main characters speech, he not only includes social commentary on the concrete tragedies of the Indian “people”, but of the psychological plight the Indian “person” faces today. Alexie makes a point to honor those of the past multiple times, saying, “…he’s waiting for that one moment to cry like it was five hundred years of tears,” and, “…he’s just a little slow developing and that’s what the doctors always say and have been saying for five hundred years.” The author simultaneously uses his “magic card tricks” to tackle the debilitating issue of modern Indian self-loathing through the eyes of the main character. For example, when the main character’s holding James at the trading Post he says, “…hold this child of mine who doesn’t cry OR RECOGNIZE THE HUMAN BEING IN HIS OWN BODY.” (My emphasis) To quote him on the subject again, “Nobody dreams all the time because it would hurt too much,” and …”I just get up and walk home almost crying because my leg AND LIFE HURT SO BAD.” (My emphasis.)

Alexei combines the past and present troubles cast on the Indian people, purposefully leading to the intentionally anti-climactic advice for the future via James. In the end, James’ conversation with his Dad acts as gospel to all Indians by preaching to not sect themselves off anymore, saying, “…you and I don’t have the right to die for each other, we should be living for each other instead. The world hurts,” and, “…the sky is not blue and the grass is not green. Everything is a matter of perception.” James, not only recognizes universal hardship in the world, but let’s his father know the importance of self- improvement. The main character recalls James’ instructions that, “He says I better learn how to shoot left-handed if I’m going to keep playing basketball. He says to open a fireworks stand.”
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Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s “Freefalling Toward a Borderless Future” features the lyrics to his spoken-word live performance. He sees all cultures, trends and social/music scenes in North American blending together. And in his vision he sees people migrating freely amongst the two continents

“News from Aztlan Liberado” is a faux-news broadcast allowing the author to undo political/social injustice against all Central American cultures by imagining the whites as the ones that are the status quo for discrimination.

Question 2: This is literary writing as Gomez-Pena combines clever oppositions of culture, “…Waspanos in the West Bank who venture illegally into Mexican territory bringing dirt, disease, drugs, prostitution & automatic weapons with them,” with multi-cultural slang like “Gringofarian” to correlate most importantly the value systems of millions via social/political injustice.

I wanted to comment about Eli's post about whether we sould laugh or not at the Alexie Sherman piece. I don't know how to answer that, though I feel similar. I am more apt to take it seriuosly. (I don't laugh unless it is absolutly oozing with irony and satire.) I have read pieces in the book The Lone Ranger and Tanto Fistfight in Heaven, and I don't remember laughing. I just thought that Alexie Sherman was really bitter and mad, and that he really disliked white people.

I know that the idea isn't far off from the Gilb piece, but for some reason it seems funnier and satirical. Perhaps it is the voice of the character....anyone else?

In the Dagoberto Gilb piece entitled “Look on the Bright Side”, a man struggles in a serio-comic way with his slum lord Mrs. Kevovian. The land lady, Mrs. Kevovian raises the rent by a significant amount and early on in the lease, even though the apartment hasn’t been taken care of and lacks any reason what-so-ever to raise the rent. The optimistic man goes to court with Mrs. Kevovian and supposedly wins his case.

The story depicts a man who stands his ground very stubbornly. It is not stubborn in a way which weakens him. It is a kind of stubborn which shows someone who stands for what they believe to be right. It can be seen by way of the man’s opposing wife who would rather give in than cause any trouble (e.g. insisting on paying the rent to Mrs. Kevovian, and trying to silence her husband when they are questioned at the border.) Though his wife might act this way, the beginning of the story already enlightens the reader with the man’s intentions that he will not be as submissive-“the way I see it, a man can have all the money in the world but if he can’t keep his self-respect, he don’t have shit.”

This quote in relation to (at least in part of) the quote from the Alexie Sherman story shows that the secrets that we never tell are a reflection of our self-respect. “I’ll never tell you and I’ll never show you the same trick twice” is to say that I won’t sell out, I won’t submit, I won’t do what you tell me. Gilb uses the character of the attorney Mr. Villalobos to contradict this. The man’s impression of “Yassir” Villalobos is that he did his people proud, but represents the wrong side: “That ain’t a nice lady you’re helping to evict us, man. […] I’m disappointed in you compa.” (P…?) Mr. Villalobos is the guy who has all the money in the world but really he “ain’t got shit”. Incidentally, he is the kind of guy who turns the same trick all the time, and it was ingenious to represent this by use of a lawyer. It’s so sell-out, so repetitious, whatever to make a buck, but absolutely no self-respect to have left when he goes home at night.

Guillermo Gόmez-Peña’s work…hilarious! It satirizes the institution of creating borders and the especially the already instituted border between Mexico and the United States. It also has a political sentiment that seems very serious. In his poem “Freefalling Toward a Borderless Future”, the serio-comedic idea is that the whole American continent would be borderless from Canada to the Antarctic. “With our Alaskan hair/ our Canadian head/ our U.S. torso/ our Mexican genitalia/ our Central American cojones/ our Caribbean sperm/ our South American legs/ our Patagonia feet/ our Antarctic feet…”

Now, why shouldn’t it be considered literary writing? Who says that it shouldn’t? As a reader I understand that literature is hard to define and in the same respect I wouldn’t criticize it as it not being such, so why is it that anyone would say that it is isn’t-especially if we haven’t defined literature indefinitely? I think in the post-modern world nearly anything has sentiments of being artistic. Are these works political because Gόmez-Peña is from Mexico? Is it because he is from Mexico that would make his literature less than anything but political? I agree that he is making political statements, but don’t the use of literary techniques and form as well as his incredible use of language credit him with any literary regard?

On the other hand, Gόmez-Peña does say the “[his] literature is as simple as a newscast.” I have never thought a newscast to be literary by any means, and so I am left at square one debating over what literature is and what is not.

Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s work show’s the world, as we know it flipped around, with societal places being exchanged and in certain cases dismantled. I was unsure whether or not I should be laughing at what I was reading. I found it to be extremely funny as well as witty, but was also filled with a sense of guilt over feeling those things. He is making light of a serious subject, and also the main subject of our texts in this class, alienation. Or as we have been calling it in class, being a mis-fit. In switching roles it was easy to visualize the obvious, that people of color or not just mistreated but largely overlooked in American society, but even just by saying American I am overlooking the people of our hemisphere who might also consider themselves American. The idea’s he portrayed seemed purposely absurd. I thought it was brilliant how in his piece he used the main cause of alienation in our country, television or rather, the media. The media has forced upon us what is supposedly an American view of the world, but it is not. The world that we see on our television and in the paper is false, and for the most part only pertains to a segment of the population, the Caucasian majority. That being said, as things in the country change and population levels shift, the numbers of minorities in this country grows but somehow the media’s view of the world does not. Without equal representation how does one even begin to feel like they belong? And due to this people, who should be looked upon as being people and not numbers, are still forced to live on the fringe of society.
All of the stories this week revolved around the main characters living on the outside of society. Saying that seems a little crude so let me rephrase, unwillingly living on the outside of society. But unlike some of our past mis-fits (the characters of O’Connor, Plath, Burroughs, Carver, Wallace, Ellis, etc…) these characters are not able to fit in due to their pigmentation rather then any other kind of alienation be it social, sexual or economic. Although social, economic and sexual (although not present in the text) alienation does come as a result of racial bias, so much so that the characters seem trapped within the confines of what is deemed acceptable by the world around them. This idea is highlighted in the work of Sherman Alexie whose characters never seem to leave the realm of the reservation. The one time leaving is mentioned in the story it was on a trip to Woolworth’s for lunch, the Woolworth store being a discount retailer, which in itself has a negative connotation. But it is hard to avoid the negative connotation in all of the work we have been presented with, and it should not be avoided. This is a worldview that exits and should not be taken lightly.
As for the Alexie quote, "That's how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic and just like a card trick and just like a mirror and just like the disappearing. Every Indian learns how to be a magician and learns how to misdirect attention and the dark hand is always quicker than the white eye and no matter how close you get to my heart you will never find out my secrets and I'll never tell you and I'll never show you the same trick twice." I think the quote portrays a sense of having to put up a front to appease society and to fit in to certain roles, although those roles may not fit and although you may still aspire for more. The quote is very sad really, we are taught to be ourselves and be true to ourselves but that just cannot be made true by a large portion of the population, the majority of the country not being accepting of a person of color, but rather only accepting of a caricature of a person of color.

In Alexie's “Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation”, he tells the story of a man on a reservation that due to sad events leads to him becoming the sole caregiver of a baby known as James. However as the baby gets older he doesn't talk or develop normally. This along with the regular stress of living causes his drinking to get out of hand. It gets so bad that at one point he didn't even know where James was. This cause him to be put in jail for abandonment of a child. Although the man eventually got James back, his aunt and friend Suzy moved in to help him take care of James. He also stopped drinking and joined A.A. meetings.

Both Alexie and Gilb hide their feelings in fantasy. When it gets to close to home then they change the subject or the focus of the subject. When James doesn't talk the narrator is okay with it cause he knows that there are words deep inside the child waiting to come out. When the man in " Look on the Bright Side" loses his job and they are having issues with the rent, him and his family decided to take a vacation. It's not that they are ignoring or running away from their problems it's just that they are dealing with them in other ways.

Gómez-Peña is a perfromance artist. It's obvious through his wirtings. He is meant to be experienced. His ideas jump off the page and scream to be heard. For me being a minority I have formed some sort of connection to the ideas he speaks to. In "News from Aztlan Liberado" he imagines that we have stepped into the Twilight Zone and that Hispanic people are now the majority. This ideal leaving the reverse to also be true, whites are now the minority and treated as such. Most of his pieces reflect a similar ideal, that of taking the expected and mixing it with the unexpected. For instance, there will always be a separation among color and economic lines but what if the Latinos where on the good side instead of the sterotypical bad, and as for the whites, what if they got a taste of the possibilities of being seen as inferior? Through his writings Gómez-Peña explores a type of equality that can only be seen as artistic revenge done with a sarcastic wit.

When he says, "MY literature is as simple as a newscast" I take it as him saying that he is being straight forward about his thoughts. He isn't using flowery language or other techniques to convey his basic meaning. But at the same time he is. In "Freefalling Toward a Borderless Future" he says, " I speak in tongues." He references his native language and the people he has grown up with. There are layers to his writing as with any piece of true literature. But with his you just don't have to look as hard to find it.

Question: In "Look on the Bright Side" when the man decides to take a nap on the park bench. Is this an exampl of how people become homeless? Do they just decide to take an indefinite break from reality?

Question:
Where does Gomez come uo with this material? He is very intelligent.
If his story were true would that cause a time-warp or paradox in history?
What was the name of the father, wife, and children in Gilbs story?
Where does an Indian learn his magic?

Tommy Toth
Online response #11

Summary of Gilb:

“Look on the Bright Side,” by Gilb is a story about a family and their struggle to live a happy life. The paradox I became aware of, was a person not giving up, and fighting for what he believed was right. Mrs. Kevovian is a slum lord. She raised the rent by sixty bucks. However the family didn’t think she had a right to do it, because the living conditions were terrible. “We‘d already with the cucarachas and rodents, I fixed the plumbing my self, and our back porch was screaming to become dust and probably would just when one of our little why nots-we have three of them –snuck on to it,” Gilb (p1).
The wife offered the check, but the land lady didn’t want to accept it. The father wanted to take the land lady to court but it would take three months. Additionally to make things worse the father was laid off, because his company went bankrupt and a couple of his checks bounced. The father was glad that he did not have to pay the rent until court. At the same time, he was waiting on a big tax return and going to collect unemployment, and he wanted to take his family on a vacation to enjoy his time off. He packed up his family and took them to Baja in his car.
Incidentally, the customs guy was asking a lot of stupid questions, and the father was getting upset. The custom guy asks him what he did to get laid off, like it was his fault. From then on, the custom guy asked why he was on vacation, when he was on unemployment. The father got a little worried because he had a 2 joints in his wallet and some liquor, he didn’t claim. He paid the penalty and kept quiet, so he wouldn’t be locked up.
Mean while the father was waiting to hear from the union hall but to no avail. Mrs. Kevovian got a good lawyer. “Her lawyer was Yassir Arafat without the bed sheet” Gilb (p5). Her lawyers name was Mr. Villalobos he offered the father an ultimatum but the father declined. The father pissed him off. Best of all the father tax check was only nine dollars with some change. “Villalobos was some brother, but I guess that’s what happens with some education and a couple of cheap suits and ties,” the father did not like him, Gilb (p10).
Eventually the father received the verdict by mail it was in his favor. He was trilled that he was right all along. Hence, he saw a painter job in the want ads, but he had to pass a test to get hired. Then he went to the library to early and sat on a concrete bench to wait until it opened. Here he met the bum named John and saw a man rolling on the floor under a tree. The bum told the father about his problems. The bum reminded him of hippies. The father waited there, until the library opened.
Response:
The protagonist in this story was the father, and the antagonist was the slum lord.
I enjoyed the plot of the story as it unfolded, but I did not get why the bum entered the story. I guess to highlight the author’s unique style of writing. The narrator writes in third person, so it was a limited point of view. The theme of the story was integrated to work well with the characters. The mood of the plot was edgy, but happiness prevailed. Even though he was still laid off and got kicked out. The irony of the story is the land lady was calling the shots, but she stilled lost the verdict.

I loved this story it was entertaining, yet it was very realistic. It reminds me of one of my old landlords. I liked the message the story gave to its readers. Fight for what you think believe in, and never let people walk all over you, just because then in a position of power.
With reference to Alexie, both stories were about people in compromising situations and their struggle with their repressors. Alexie’s story too was about a man doing what he thought was right, stopping drinking. With reference to Gomez the father in “Look on the Bright Side,” by Gilb was reversing the power roles. In Gomez’s story he reversed the racism, white male bigotry, and American conformity into the favor of Hispanics, against Illegal whites or the wasp backs.

In Sherman Alexie’s ”Jesus Christ’s Half Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation” we read about an Indian young male who accidently becomes an adoptive father to the boy, whom he calls James, although the boy has an Indian name. The protagonist struggles with his life. He is searching for the sense of living perhaps. We can detect that longing when he describes the sun, and stars. He is very descriptive of nature. He is raising up the boy, but finds it hard, especially that the boy doesn’t talk or walk. Years go by, and nothing changes. The boy does not speak and the protagonist seems not to change much, although he quit drinking. One day the boy, aged seven now, started to speak. And he spoke beautifully about life, and the sense of it. He even though only seven seemed like some sort of preacher. As the title suggest he possessed the knowledge that Jesus once had, and maybe he is Jesus’s brother in spirit.

The other story from the collection ”Look on the Bright Side” by Dagoberto Glib talks about a man who was laid. He decides to go to Mexico with his family, after all what they went through. The landlady who rents them an apartment wants more and more money, or actually she raises the rent illigally, making them pay a lot more than they should. The protagonist has the money to pay the lady the rent, but he does’t want to go against himself, for the landlady is the one changing the ren conditions, not him, yet she does’t see how much he put into the building already. The court is involved in solving the problem. The protagonist wins.

In both of these stories there is an identity issue. The first story has an Indian young male with the little boy looking for the sense of living. But toward the end, when the child finally speaks up, the whole importance of living is revealed in front of him. Now he knows, he wants this boy to educate himself, and maybe one day educate him as well.
The second story talks about the struggle not just etween tha landlady and the man who is rentin the apartment, but it is him, the protaginist fighting with the world to know that he has got his honor, and the right to chose. He doesn’t need no advises, for he knows what he wants. He wants justice, and he gains it.
In both of the stories I find a similar theme that goes throughout the texts. Both stories have these young men trying to be the head of the family, the one their natural or adoptive children can rely on. They both are searching who they are. They want to be strong, and I think they become strong and needed people.

The longing to become one unbreakable, one with identity and reason I also find in Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s poetry. In his writing I actually find more than that because I see the cry, or even the speech to the world, to Mexicans in particular perhaps that one should never get disected by multiple hands, that one should stay whom s/he is. The motives of identity, ethicity, belonginess to the culture, certain society and environment, is touched by all three authors, although I see it the most in Gómez-Peña’s writing.
I think that tonight’s reading opened up a very imporatnt issue of who we are, and who we want to be, as well as who we turn out to be.

QUESTION: At first I thought Gómez-Peña is very patriotic, and very attached to his country.
I thought he wanted to raise Mexico above all other places on the globe, talking in his poems about how distinct and specific his culture is. He talks about the ”cultural otherness.” The reason why I would think he want to raise Mexicans higher is because of the amount of the hispanic words in his works. Then the poem of borderless future changed my mind a little. I am very interested how this author is taken in Mexico, do people know of him, and what do they say about him.

Alexie’s “Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation” is a story of a young Indian guy who adopts an infant (James) from the fire. His days seem monotonous; he raises the kid, plays basketball, and drinks too much. James, on the other hand, doesn’t talk until his seventh birthday on a Christmas day. Altogether, the tale portrays the everyday sad, alienated life in the poor Indian reservation. Hence, seeing beauty in the simple, small things is a way of survival. Making poetry out of life whenever possible and “making the ordinary just like magic” is the only effective method for dealing with the downfalls of life for the people who lost everything but their imagination to the invading force of the white men.
Glib’s “Look on the Bright Side” is a story about a working class guy with a family who takes his landlord to court for raising the rent illegally. In the meantime, the man loses his job and struggles financially to make the ends meet. All that takes a big toll on him but despite the circumstances he doesn’t let it drag him down. Similarly to the character in Alexie’s writing, although less poetically and perhaps less dramatically, the man focuses on opportunities rather than threats; he is jobless but takes his family for a vacation and then continues to go on in his search for a job and decent life. Therefore, I think that characters in Alexie’s and Gilb’s stories truly learned how to evade the negative by filtering its effects through the channels of their mind and by holding on to the last pieces of their pride and self-respect.
Gómez-Peña Guillermo in his poetry touches upon the subjects of ethnicity, nationality, political turmoil, and post-colonial problems of Latin America. In “Freefalling toward a Borderless Future” he mixes the pop-culture and modern elements with the ancient symbols of Aztecs and multinational references. In the “News from Aztlán Liberado” and “Chicanost: Radio Nuevo Order” the author, for the most part, presents the exaggerated, shocking, and even absurd news in a world of chaos that has been largely turned “upside down”. I think that Guillermo’s work has some elements of the literary writing because it is controversial, critical, and it makes us think. It is more than “just plain political argument” because it is artistic, poetic, and it allows for multiple interpretations. His words are sometimes blunt and sometimes indirect, and the vivid images in his work gave me the feeling of flipping through the colored pages of a newspaper.
QUESTION: IN ALEXIE’S PIECE, IS JAMES REALLY TALKING AT THE END, OR IS IT JUST THE NARRATOR’S WISHFUL THINKING OR ANOTHER “MAGIC TRICK” TO “MISDIRECT ATTENTION”?