Letter to a Friend

Dear Erick,

I am writing to you today because I wanted to inform you about two articles I read for my Central American Studies class called At the Margins of Nation by Alejandro Lee and Central American-Americans. Both articles seem similar in that they are analyzing a type of diaspora. A diaspora is a dispersion of a people from their original homeland. Margins of Nations seems to analyze the Chinese diaspora into Mexico (Chinese people in mexico? weird right?). Central American-Americans seems to be analyzing the migration of Central Americans into the United States. These articles are really interesting because they highlight the struggles of both the chinese living in Mexico and Central Americans adjusting to live in the United States.

Margins of Nation focuses on how Chinese people lived in Latin America and how they were portrayed in literary works.In most works they are portrayed in some sort of negative way since they weren’t able to assimilate to the Hispanic culture at that time. They couldn’t speak the language so they couldn’t communicate effectively with the people who lived in Latin America. Life for them was hard because of this and they were targets of abuse.

To me this is really interesting because I had never thought about people migrating to Latin America to have a better life. It especially surprised me that Chinese people would be willing to migrate to there. The lives that they seemed to live seemed to be a hard life.They faced a lot of discrimination because people didn’t know what to think of the newly immigrated chinese. It didn’t help that they couldn’t communicate with the people there. The chinese are also excellent marketmen and this caused jealousy from the natives since so many chinese were able to become successful.

Central American-Americans focuses on  Central Americans migrating to the United States. The many years of Civil war affected many and were forced to migrate to avoid all the bloodshed and death. The article talks about how these Central Americans come here and try to assimilate into the new culture and forget their own culture because they are trying to forget everything horrible they left behind. They have a sense of lost identity because of this. I would recommend you to read these articles.

Sincerely,

Misael