Immigrants in our own land Reflection
The way that I understood this poem was that it talks about immigrants coming into this new land to have a better life for themselves and their families, but end up disappointed by how they're treated when arriving. Their administration makes the different races segregated because they say that the cultures should not be mixed. To think of it "like in the old neighborhoods we came from." The poem ended with saying that this world is not what everybody imagines it to be. Pretty much saying that it'll ruin immigrants' lives. The tone that I got from it was resentful, as if the author resented leaving his home to come to the country to just be disappointed. Disappointment was another tone that I picked up because he imagined this extraordinary country for a better life, but was faced with bad conditions. A literary device that Baca uses is metaphor, for instance when he says "My cell" when he really means his living space but uses the word "cell" to make us envision how bad it was. The mood is also disappointment because with all the things that he says and describes, led me to think that he was expecting a country full of opportunities for a better life, but when he actually got there, he saw how it truly was and saw that it was not at all what he expected.