Website URL

http://sites.google.com/site/southwesternillusion/

and the spanish version:

http://sites.google.com/site/elsuroestedelailusion/

Three Dimensional Issue

I am really enjoying putting together the website for the final project. The website Christina and I are working on is focused on Pat Moras poem La Migra that we covered the second week of class. I really enjoyed the poem due to it having so much symbolism that makes you contemplate on how it all relates to our society. The reason for choosing to develop a website on the poem is mainly due to my interest in the topic because I am an immigrant here after all. In the beginning of the year I felt like Lou and I didn’t have adequate time to work on our presentation due to only having a week to get it ready so I felt a little rushed and figured this would set a perfect opportunity to delve further into the issue of illegal immigration.

The research for the website came pretty simple seeing as how illegal immigration a popularly debated currently. The idea of website Christina and I are almost finished making focuses on presenting the issue of illegal immigration to the high school students. The reason for picking high school students as the center audience is that when I was in high school, two years ago, the issue was presented as that immigration is bad and we should have strict border patrol to keep illegals out. Of all the U. S. history teachers I had, three, not one of them highlighted that Mexican’s did occupy Southwestern U. S. until we acquired the territory and drove them out or asked for them to abandon their loyalty to Mexico and consider themselves American. The idea really truck me when we covered it in class and added a whole new element to the issue of immigration from Mexico which is that the land belongs more to the Mexicans than it does to us.

Our website begins with introduction to the topic of issues on immigration. It then has Pat Mora’s poem La Migra to emphasize both sides, border patrol and illegal immigrants, of the struggle at the border. The following two sub-pages separately focus on analyzing each stanza in order to clarify for the audience the symbols Pat Mora uses in her poem to convey her message to her audience. The remainder of the website highlights support for both the border patrol site and the Mexican immigrant side of the issue.

Christina and I choose not to take a stance on the issue and let the high school audience of the website decide by presenting support for both sides. Being a psychology major I learned that influential information that is presented last will have more of a persuasive impact on the audience to side with stance it takes. In order to help avoid such dilemma Christina and I decided it would be best to alternate between border patrol and Mexican immigrant sides of Pat Moras poem instead of presenting all the support for border patrol side and having the last pages of the site be dedicated to support Mexican immigrant. Overall I am enjoying working on this project and look forward to presenting it this Saturday.

Distorted Reality

The novel “The Lone Ranger and the Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” by Sherman Alexie is turing out to be an excellent and entertaining read. The novel is split in 24 individual short stories that all come together through the main characters and their experience to emphasize the theme of the tragedy Native Americans faced when forced by the government to relocate to reservations. The events that take place in the novel manage to divert the audience from the mainstream myths and provide a glimpse into the reality of struggles Native Americans have.

From the very first chapter Sherman Alexie managed to grasp my complete attention by the way he described the party main characters had. The obscene language that the author used in depicting the fights and arguments highlights the effects of being forced to live in reservation such as alcoholism and severe depression. My Medical Sociology class discussed recently that Native Americans have been documented in 2004 to have the highest rates of liver disease and cirrhosis, accidents, and suicide out of the entire United States population. Another interesting statistic that we discussed is how Native Americans rate of mortality related to alcohol is 178 % higher than the general public. The statistics that my Medical Sociology class described such as suicide and liver disease rates stem strictly from the effects of alcoholism and depression among the Native American population which is a byproduct of the historical events that took place where our government forced the Native Americans to relocate.

The entire novel easily challenges the audience view of Native Americans based on their portrayal in the media. One particular chapter that challenged my perspective of the Native Americans was The Drug Called Tradition. The chapter focuses on the second largest party that the main character in this part of the novel, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, had. In this chapter the main characters Thomas, Victor, and Junior take a ride down to Benjamin Lake where they take a hallucinogenic drug that forces the character to imagine events from the past. This particular chapter challenged my view of what I imagined the typical Native American to act like. I mainly believed that typically Native Americans are extremely disciplined based on their historic struggles as well as how they are commonly depicted in the movies, however the actions described by Alexie highlight how they are no different than any ordinary American, indicating that the view our society has of them has been romanticized.

When thinking about the difference between the way Native Americans are depicted in the media versus reality I kept think over the reason why they are romanticized to be so extremely disciplined in the way the media portrays them? Is it a way they ancestors acted like before they were forced to live on reservation, or could it be a way our society is attempting to show favor in order to make up for all the wrong doing. Overall this is turing out to be a great read and every chapter provokes a great deal of thoughts. One last point I’d like to make is I stumbled on a trailer for a movie called Smoke Signals which was made in 1998 and is based on the novel. Now Im just curious how the director pieced together all the stories in the book to make the film flow without jumping around. Heres the link to the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XYEE-TBJlM