Term Paper on "Immigration and the American Dream in Junot Diaz's Drown"

Quoted Instructions for "Immigration and the American Dream in Junot Diaz's Drown" Assignment:

****The Directions for this paper***

Text: Drown, Junot Diaz

Topic: Immigration

Objective: The objective of the English 199 course is to analyze primary (novel) and secondary sources (articles) and write a research paper based on a THESIS that the students has developed.

Description:The text for the course will be the primary source for the paper. There is one assignment due (research paper) on August 11th without exception.

Assignment:

Write a 5-8-page research paper using Drown as a primary source with a minimum of 2 secondary sources to support your thesis. You will need to submit a draft of the paper for approval in order to pass the course. You need to use the MLA format to properly cite sources and include in text citations to meet the guidelines of research writing at the college level. Paper should be paginated and include a work cited page

In order to pass the course you will need to:

1. Submit a 5-8 page research paper based on the book Drown

2. Include secondary sources to support your point of view

3. Choose one of the questions below and write a documented paper supporting your thesis.

4. Provide a work cited page with all sources cited correctly in the MLA format

Consider one of following questions as the topic of you research paper. You will need to support your opinion with details from the readings and provide a thesis in the beginning of the paper.

1. Is America the land of the free? Does the American Dream exist? Do you believe that Diaz believes the American Dream applies for today’s immigrant?

2. Diaz writes in the first and last short story about a family who become divided because the father migrates to America. What are the ramifications to the nuclear family when integral family members (like mothers and fathers) chose to migrate to America and leave their children behind in their home country? Under what circumstances do people migrate? What are the living situations of the people in their country and in countries like Haiti or Mexico?

3. Do you agree with President Bush that we should put several millions dollars into border control at this moment? Do you agree with his tactics and approach to solving the immigration issue? If not, what would you do differently?

***Here is a link the professor told me to go to find some good sources on immigration***

http://www.immigration-usa.com/debate.html

*****all the information you need for this book******

"Drown" by Junot Diaz

About the Author

Remarkably, Junot Diaz is only the second Dominican-American to have published a book of fiction in English (Julia Alvarez was the first). He is primarily a ***** of poetry and prose fiction but his work is largely autobiographical.

One of five children, Diaz was born in 1969 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Knowing no English, he moved with his family to New Jersey at age seven. He began writing at about thirteen in an effort to escape the pain of his parents' failing marriage, his family's poverty, and his older brother's newly diagnosed leukemia. He later graduated from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where his ***** praised his talent for writing poetry and prose and encouraged him to pursue a literary career. Toward this end, he went on to complete a master of fine arts degree at Cornell University.

Before gaining success as a *****, Diaz held various jobs, including dishwasher, pool table deliverer, steelworker, and editorial assistant. His first published works consisted mainly of poetry, but he soon branched out into short stories and essays, publishing stories in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Best American Stories before the age of thirty. Drown, a collection of short stories that draws on his youth in Santo Domingo and in New Jersey, was his first book. A 1999 recipient of a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship, Diaz has won many literary awards. In 1997 he won a Pushcart Prize, and the following year he won the Eugene McDermott Award. More recently, The New Yorker named him one of the Twenty *****s for the Twenty-first Century. Diaz teaches creative writing at Syracuse University.

Overview

Drown is an intensely raw and realistic collection of ten short stories. Although the stories share neither one common protagonist nor one common setting, each story involves a Dominican or Dominican American adolescent male's struggle to survive in the harsh and often violent world of poverty, drugs, and petty crime. Diaz's young protagonists, who live in rural areas of the Dominican Republic or in Dominican neighborhoods of suburban New Jersey, struggle to survive in the face of absent fathers, abject poverty, and tedious jobs.

Setting

Two settings dominate these stories: the rural Dominican Republic and suburban New Jersey..Both are tough, grim settings, awash in poverty and misery. The stories that contain the most Spanish words and phrases are set in the Dominican Republic.

The stories set in the United States contain less Spanish and more English slang terms, creating a sharp narrative contrast between the two environments.

Although both settings share a defining poverty, and almost all of the families in the stories are desperately poor, the families who live in the Dominican Republic are the poorest, often lacking basic necessities and suffering related health problems. The mother in "Aguantando" is periodically forced to send her children to live with relatives because she cannot afford to feed them. She tries to ease the pain of their situation by telling her children that things could be worse: "We were poor. The only way we could have been poorer was to have lived in the campo or to have been Haitian immigrants, and Mami regularly offered these to us as brutal consolation." Still, the family cannot afford meat or beans, living off of boiled yucca, boiled plantano (plantains), pieces of cheese, and shreds of bacalao (codfish). In "No Face," the younger brother suffers never-healing scabs on his scalp, probably due to malnutrition. Poverty is inescapable for these Dominicans, except possibly through emigration.

Moving to the United States, however, provides only minimal relief from poverty.

To the characters in the stories, impoverished suburban New Jersey is the United States, with its "break-apart buildings, the little strips of grass, the piles of garbage around the cans, and the dump, especially the dump," all of which typify the impoverished Dominican neighborhoods where the characters reside. To these young immigrants and children of immigrants, life in the States involves walking along the sides of gritty highways, breaking into abandoned apartments to live for short periods of time, selling illicit drugs to teens at gas stops and public pools, and urinating freely in public.

These characters are aware that there is another New Jersey, another United States, where wealthy Caucasians swim in sterilized swimming pools in their own backyards and hire recent immigrants to clean their rambling kitchens, but this world is so unattainable that it may as well not exist.

The narrator in "Edison, New Jersey" explains how last names, which serve as ethnic background identifiers, separate the two worlds of New Jersey: "Pruitt. Most of our customers have names like this, court case names: Wooley, Maynard, Gass, Binder, but the people from my town, our names, you see on convicts or coupled together on boxing cards."

Themes and Characters

The protagonists in Drown live midway between childhood and adulthood, as do the protagonists in all classic works of young adult literature. These boys and young men vary in age from nine through about twenty.

The younger protagonists are still clearly children, climbing trees and playing ball games, yet they witness and experience decidedly adult events, such as learning of their fathers' marital infidelities and engaging in basic sexual experimentation. The older protagonists face the reality of having to support themselves to survive from day to day, yet they often retreat into more childish behaviors, dreaming of unrealistic futures and methods of escaping from the responsibilities of impending adulthood.

The title of the collection can be seen as a reference to the drowning of the young protagonists' innocence as they leave the comforting protection of childhood and enter the harsh reality of adulthood.

On the surface, these main characters appear toughened and inured to emotional pain, yet they harbor deep emotional sensitivities. The protagonist in "Boyfriend" claims to be immune to Girlfriend's obvious emotional pain: "I guess I'd gotten numb to that sort of thing. I had heartleather like walruses got blubber." He wishes his heart were hardened, yet he maintains empathy even for a total stranger's pain, as he listens to Girlfriend's crying for days, following her movements as she wanders around her apartment, wishing he could talk to her. He is also suffering from his own broken heart, further destroying his attempt to be tough and unattached. Girlfriend herself wants to be emotionally impenetrable, cutting off her luxurious hair to appear tougher, but this action is merely a response to the lasting pain she feels from Boyfriend's callous rejection of her. No matter how the characters try to toughen themselves, they still feel the pain of their disappointing lives.

Most of the families represented in Drown are broken families with no fathers. Even though the fathers are absent, the familial culture Diaz presents is still mostly patriarchal. When they are on the scene, the fathers exercise almost total authority and children fear their father's violent temper, and when they are absent, having deserted their families for a variety of reasons, the fathers' influence on the families remains strong. The specters of their missing fathers hang forever in the back of the main characters' minds. Even in "Fiesta, 1980," the only story in the book in which the protagonist lives with his father, it is clear that the family is on the brink of demise. Papi spends increasing amounts of time with his mistress as his passive wife fears their impending separation. Both sons are aware of the situation, but they are powerless to stop their father from leaving.

It is the mothers in these stories who suffer the most from this patriarchal familial culture. In "Fiesta, 1980," Mami closes her eyes as her husband pulls their son to his feet by his ear, anticipating that her husband will beat the boy. She objects in no way because "being around Papi all her life had turned her into a major-league wuss.

Anytime Papi raised his voice her lip would start trembling, like some specialized tuning fork." Similarly, life has beaten down the mother in "Drown" to such an extent that she barely continues to exist, living more as an automaton than a thinking, feeling human. She has almost turned into a part of the apartment in which she subsists: "She's so quiet that most of the time I'm startled to find her in the apartment. I'll enter a room and she'll stir, detaching herself from the cracking plaster walls, from the stained cabinets... . She has discovered the secret to silence: pouring cafe without a splash, walking between rooms as if gliding on a cushion of felt, crying without a sound."

Women generally play secondary roles in the book and are rarely mentioned except as side characters. Exceptions include Aurora and the girlfriend in "Boyfriend," who can perhaps be seen as the protagonists of their stories. Unlike the men in the book, who suffer from chronic boredom, the ever-working mothers view idle time as but a fantasy as they struggle to support their families both on the job and at home, despite the poverty and violence that rule their lives.

Violence is central to these stories, and all of the characters experience it in a variety of forms. Together, these ten stories highlight the violence in which youth often engage. Older brothers pummel their younger brothers, and the street gangs torment unpopular outsiders. Older brothers spend a lot of time training their younger brothers, often through violence. In many ways, the role of the older brothers seems to be to prepare the younger brothers for the cruelty and disappointment of the adult world.

Older brothers not only physically beat their younger siblings but harass them in other ways as well. For example, in "Aguantando," Rafa flaunts a lighter in front of Yunior and promises to give it to him if he "shuts up."

When Yunior responds with a hopeful, "Yeah?" Rafa reneges on the offer: "See....

You already lost it." Rafa is preparing Yunior for the many disappointments he will face in his adult life.

Violence is also central to the many malefemale relationships in the book. Most of the fathers threaten and beat most of the mothers; most of the young boyfriends threaten and beat most of the young girlfriends. The male characters create much of the violence in the book, yet they are occasionally victims of violence as well. In "Negocios," Papi had "been robbed twice already, his ribs beaten until they were bruised." In his home, Papi laughs with delight in response to the violence he sees in Tom and Jerry cartoons. His world is violent, both at home and on the streets, and he finds violence both repugnant and appealing, depending on whether he is the victim, the perpetrator, or the observer.

Although the males initiate most of the violence in the stories, the females also instigate violence at times. For instance, Mami slaps Yunior in "Aguantando" and makes him kneel on sharp pebbles with his face to the wall as a form of punishment.

The title character in "Aurora" is probably the most violent female in the book when she fights back in response to her boyfriend's physical abuse. When he punches her chest until it turns black and blue, Aurora tries to jam a pen into his thigh. She also often leaves deep nail scratches on his body.

And even though they have had a fairly long-term romantic relationship, the homeless, penniless Aurora steals from her boyfriend's pockets as he sleeps. Despite their obviously unhealthy relationship, the two like to fool themselves into thinking that they are "normal folks. Like maybe everything was fine." But the violence and the mistrust that characterize their relationship presage an adult life of continued relational dysfunction. Even as they fool themselves into thinking they have a "normal" relationship, violence lurks in wait. Aurora tells the boyfriend that while she was in juvenile jail she created a fantasy future for the two of them, with kids, a big blue house, and even hobbies. A week later, though, the boyfriend explains, "she would be asking me again, begging actually, telling me all the good things we'd do and after a while I hit her and made the blood come out of her ear like a worm.".

170 Drown Indeed, many of the characters try to fool themselves in a like manner to escape their miserable conditions. In "Aguantando," Yunior avoids the obvious conclusion that his father has abandoned the family, thinking of him instead only rarely, and then in vague terms as a composite of other children's fathers and of other adults he knows: On the days I had to imagine him--not often, since Mami didn't much speak of him anymore--he was the soldier in the photo. He was a cloud of cigar smoke, the traces of which could still be found on the uniforms he'd left behind. He was pieces of my friends' fathers, of the domino players on the corner, pieces of Mami and Abuelo. I didn't know him at all. I didn't know that he'd abandoned us. That this waiting for him was all a sham.

He fools himself into believing that his father will return.

Similarly, Ysreal turns to fantasizing to escape his misfortunes. He imagines himself a superhero, fighting evil and avenging wrong. Even in the face of abject poverty, tragic misfortune, and brutal social isolation, Diaz portrays in Ysreal a child whose imagination and hope remain intact. Ironically, Ysreal, the character who faces the harshest circumstances of all of the characters in the book, is portrayed with the most optimism for life.

Boredom is another important theme that runs through these stories. The characters who have jobs find them dull and unsatisfying, and even the characters who work suffer from long hours of idle time (with the exception of the mothers). The main characters in "Edison, New Jersey" are so bored with their pool table delivery jobs that they pass the time guessing what towns will be included on their delivery route the next day. Wayne's state of boredom even extends to his private life, and he has a series of extramarital affairs to relieve the routine of his home life.

Similar to boredom is the theme of waiting. Many of the characters are waiting for events that will most likely never occur.

The young protagonists are often waiting for the fathers who abandoned them to come back, but the fathers rarely return.

The deserted mothers also are often waiting for the return of their husbands. Most wait for years, never to see their spouses again.

For the characters in the book, life is disappointing and unfulfilling, with little hope for the future.

Literary Qualities

The stories in Drown are fairly short, averaging between fifteen and twenty pages.

Only "Negocios" is much longer, at fiftyfour pages. Each story is a slice of life, more a presentation of setting, character, and mood than a plot-driven tale. Many of the stories have unclear resolutions.

As Diaz himself admits, much of his work is thinly veiled autobiography. His work is definitely fiction, however, and not to be seen as accurately portraying his own life. His life serves as literary inspiration, but he freely embellishes and changes characters, settings, and events to enhance his storytelling.

Diaz's greatest literary strength is his narrative style. He creates raw prose and uses spare language in an unadorned style similar to reportage. All but two of the stories are in the first-person voice. "No Face" is told in the third person. Its smoothly flowing, dreamlike narrative style sets it apart from the other stories and makes it a story that lends itself especially well to reading aloud: "He watches the sun burn the mists from the fields and despite the heat the beans are thick and green and flexible in the breeze.... He's tired and aching but he looks out over the valley, and the way the land curves away to hide itself reminds him of the way Lou hides his dominos when they play."

"How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie" is told in the secondperson voice, which allows the narrator to address the reader directly and serves to heighten the humor in the story. For example, Diaz writes, "She'll say, I like Spanish guys, and even though you've never been to Spain, say, I like you. You'll sound smooth." The second-person narration turns this satire of racial tension into a comical dating guide.

The remaining eight stories are told in the first person. Diaz's first-person narrative is colloquial and casual. For example, in "Fiesta, 1980," the narrator comments, "If Papi had walked in and caught us lounging around in our underwear, he would have kicked our asses something serious.

He didn't say nothing to nobody, not even my moms." Diaz's rather unadorned firstperson style reads almost like sociological field notes that record events while reserving commentary and analysis.

However, even the first-person stories contain occasional bursts of poetic loveliness, such as this brief description in the brutal tale "Ysreal": "Rosebushes blazed around the yard like compass points, and the mango trees spread out deep blankets of shade where we could rest and play dominos." Diaz's spare use of language enables him to create a vividly realistic scene in just one or two sentences. He develops the setting for "Drown" in just two sentences: "The heat in the apartments was like something heavy that had come inside to die. Families arranged on their porches, the glow from their TVs washing blue against the brick."

Diaz's style also includes recurrent frank discussions of sexual activities, and sexual curiosity and sexual awakening are central to the stories. For example, twelve-year-old Rafa brags about his sexual experimentation in "Ysreal." Even more sexually blunt is a scene in "Fiesta, 1980" in which Papi has sex with his mistress while Yunior sits downstairs watching television. Diaz also includes frank portrayals of the young men's homosexual experimentation in the title story, experimentation that leads the protagonist to bitterly rue his behavior.

Profanity also characterizes Diaz's narrative style, adding rhythm and tone to descriptive passages, as in the use of "ass" in the following sentence: "Homeboy's got himself an Afro and his big head looks ridiculous on his skinny-ass neck." This generous use of profanity is part of Diaz's success in authentically replicating everyday speech patterns.

In addition to profanity, Spanish words and phrases also lend the narrative an authentic tone. When Diaz incorporates Spanish into the text, he does so without using italics or quotation marks to separate the Spanish from the English. Moreover, he rarely offers contextual definitions of the Spanish words he uses, and he never offers parenthetical or footnoted translations. As a result, his mixing of Spanish and English more closely resembles naturally occurring speech than does the mixed language prose of many other authors, who present foreign words and phrases so as to stand out visually from the English.

In some cases, readers unfamiliar with Spanish might have trouble understanding significant aspects of these stories, as in the title story "Drown," in which Diaz introduces the crucial term "pato" (homosexual) in the first paragraph of the story, writing simply, "He's a pato now but two years ago we were friends." The meaning of the word becomes contextually apparent only toward the end of the story. The meanings of other Spanish words never become clear from the text, as in the use of "finca" (farm) in the following passage: "On some days I spent entire afternoons in our trees, watching the barrio in motion and when Abuelo was around (and awake) he talked to me about the good old days, when a man could still make a living from his finca."

Also unusual is Diaz's frequent incorporation of snippets of dialogue into his narrative passages, which he does without separating the dialogue with quote marks or speaker tags, and without creating new paragraphs to indicate changing speakers.

For example, all within one paragraph he writes: Sometimes the customer has to jet to the store for cat food or a newspaper while we're in the middle of a job. I'm sure you'll be all right, they say. They never sound too sure. Of course, I say. Just show us where the silver's at. The customers ha-ha and we ha-ha and then they agonize over leaving, linger by the front door, trying to memorize everything they own, as if they don't know where to find us, who we work for.

The result is a raw tone that resembles the disjointed nature of actual human speech patterns.

Diaz also uses humor to temper the painful realities of poverty, drugs, crime, and violence in his characters' lives. In "Fiesta, 1980," for instance, the young protagonist vomits on every ride in his father's beloved new van. His constant carsickness is portrayed lightheartedly, mitigating the more unpleasant central plot, in which the boy's father is preparing to abandon his mother to live with his mistress. Nonetheless, the humor does not fully alleviate the wistful feeling of loss of innocence and childhood that permeates the book. Most of the characters are likely to spend the remainder of their lives discontented with their menial jobs, possibly turning to drugs or crime, in a never-ending circle of poverty, failed relationships, and discontent.

Social Sensitivity

Drown is a candid, blunt book. Just as Diaz does not shy away from presenting the seedy side of life in poverty, he does not scrub his stories clean of racial and cultural conflicts. For the most part, the author reserves comment on the settings and cultures that he portrays, but his characters occasionally express cultural biases. In "Fiesta, 1980," for instance, Mami dislikes all things American: "In her mind, American things--appliances, mouthwash, funnylooking upholstery--all seemed to have an intrinsic badness about them." On the contrary, Papi seems to favor American luxury items, a discord that foreshadows the marital friction between the two characters. Even when he profiles drug dealers and petty criminals, Diaz refrains from moralizing, attempting only to present his characters authentically.

Racial issues underlie all of the stories.

Most of the characters are Dominican; many also have black skin. Racial issues are treated the most overtly in "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie." Diaz treats discord between racial groups with humor in this story, directly confronting the racial tension that adolescents face in schools and other community environments and tying that tension to skin color. For example, the narrator asserts that visiting the girl's family will be especially strained, and racial issues will inevitably arise: "Dinner will be tense.... A halfie will tell you that her parents met in the Movement, will say, Back then people thought it a radical thing to do. It will sound like something her parents made her memorize."

Issues of cultural adjustment also underlie the stories, but they are usually secondary to the plots. Unlike many fiction works that depict the immigrant experience in the United States, Drown does not attempt to detail the process of cultural adjustment.

Drown 173 The characters are never shown struggling to learn English, nor do they struggle against the often bewildering American governmental bureaucracy. Nonetheless, they face considerable discrimination and hardship in the United States, and their immigrant status largely defines their characters.

"Negocios" deals the most directly with cultural conflict, as Papi struggles for years to survive in a foreign land. Away from home and in an unfamiliar country, Papi is forced to rely on a woman to survive. He marries Nilda for citizenship and for financial security, not for love or companionship. He resents this dependency on a woman, a dependency that clashes with his culture's patriarchal basis. In the end, he leaves Nilda and reunites his broken first family, escaping from a second family to which he never really seemed to belong.

You can start the Introduction with the following:

Introduction

Drown is an intensely raw and realistic collection of ten short stories. Although the stories share neither one common protagonist nor one common setting, each story involves a Dominican or Dominican American adolescent male's struggle to survive in the harsh and often violent world of poverty, drugs, and petty crime. Diaz's young protagonists, who live in rural areas of the Dominican Republic or in Dominican neighborhoods of suburban New Jersey, struggle to survive in the face of absent fathers, abject poverty, and tedious jobs.

I REALLY NEED A THESIS< INTRODUCTION< AND CONCLUSION.

Here is a statement I started to write and if you could put this in there that would be grate....

I do believe that the “American Dream” still exists today. For example, my girlfriend’s father (Farouk) is a West Indian immigrant from Trinidad & Tabago. He got a “VISA” to come over to the United States when he was 17 years old. He came over here with only 20 dollars in his pocket. When Farouk was in the States he transferred all of his high school credits, to a high school in the Boston area try get a High School diploma. They denied him thee diploma and told him,” in order for you to get you H.S. diploma you need to take a whole year of classes here or you can take these four books (which included trigonometry, physics, English writing, and U.S. history) home to study them for two weeks and take a five hour test in front of me using no notes. If you pass we will honor you and give you your H.S. diploma.” Farouk chose to take the books home to study for two weeks. When it was time for Farouk to take the test, He went in there and finished it in three hours. He passed with flying colors and got is diploma. After that he took night classes at Wentworth Institute of technology, in Electronic Engineering to get his associates degree. While he was taking night classes he managed to get in to realestate with no money and managed to buy a multifamily and two apartment complexes in Dorchester. When the market crashed in the 90’s he became broke and his wife and five kids were living of food stamps for a few years. He and his family held on tight for a bought five years and Farouk got a job with EMC with is associates degree. He has seven patens with the company, making a lot of money and is know living the American Dream!

***Here is a link the professor told me to go to find some good sources on immigration***

http://www.immigration-usa.com/debate.html If you could use two sources on this website that would be great and my other source would be my girlfriends father farouk.

*****