About This Activity
You will be asked to turn in reading responses regularly throughout the course. A Reader Response is an opportunity for you to formalize your thinking about a text.
INSTRUCTIONS
1. Read Chicano Masculinities – Kostia Lennes Download Chicano Masculinities – Kostia Lennesand Historical Trauma as Public Narrative – Nathaniel Mohatt et al. Download Historical Trauma as Public Narrative – Nathaniel Mohatt et al.as context for Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo.
2. Based on the following description of Children of the Land, what connections might you anticipate/make to the articles by Lennes and Mohatt et al.
“When Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was five years old and his family was preparing to cross the border between Mexico and the United States, he suffered temporary, stress-induced blindness. Castillo regained his vision, but quickly understood that he had to move into a threshold of invisibility before settling in California with his parents and siblings. Thus began a new life of hiding in plain sight and of paying extraordinarily careful attention at all times for fear of being truly seen. Before Castillo was one of the most celebrated poets of a generation, he was a boy who perfected his English in the hopes that he might never seem exceptional. With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts his and his family’s encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, simple lives. He writes of the Sunday afternoon when he opened the door to an ICE officer who had one hand on his holster, of the hours he spent making a fake social security card so that he could work to support his family, of his father’s deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his wife and children only to be denied reentry, and of his mother’s heartbreaking decision to leave her children and grandchildren so that she could be reunited with her estranged husband and retire from a life of hard labor. Children of the Land distills the trauma of displacement, illuminates the human lives behind the headlines and serves as a stunning meditation on what it means to be a man and a citizen.”
3. In a minimum of 300 words, complete a TQE for the articles above: share your thoughts about each piece, questions they raise for you in the context of our course/ future reading, and the epiphanies or a-ha! moments that result. Please support your insights with evidence from the text.
