Mixed Race America

Mixed Race America
  The works of Child of the America’s by Aurora Levins Morales and What It’s Like to be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t) by Patricia Smith was because of the direct contrast of the statements “I am whole” in Morales poem verses “…and feeling like you’re not finished” in Smith’s poem. Both statements in these poems are strong, stating a completion of a human soul and both poems are in agreement that race is a part of the completion to the human soul. Levins Morales’ poem explains what it is really like to be of mixed race in America. Smith’s poem gives a deep, more individual approach of what it is like to be a black girl.   Race is a background for both poems.
Race and ethnicity have drastically changed in the last half-decade, due to attitudes and issues changing and America has become one great melting pot of culture and race.   Over the last 50 years, our culture has changed due to interracial relations and immigration.   Immigration truly came to America through Ellis Island in the 1800’s when immigrants were settling through New York. In Child of the Americas the narrator makes reference of this in the statement, “a product of the ghettos of New York I have never known.” Back then, cultures were so vastly different that people stayed to themselves for fear of the unknown.
The narrator in the poem Child of the America’s drew me in with the description of her background because she knew she was very different racially. She is not bothered by the fact that she is ethnically diverse.   She is, “a mestizo of the Caribbean, a child of many diaspora, a U.S. Puerto Rican Jew.”   When I first read the word diaspora I naturally assumed that it was a Spanish term.   Diaspora actually is a Greek term and can mean the scattering, migration, or dispersing of a group. She knew that she was,” an immigrant and the daughter of immigrants.”   She is speaking with a voice that states that she is at peace with her identity of immigrants.
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