Takaki Chapter 12

Takaki Chapter 12 discusses the immigration on Chicanos from Mexico the United States. Takaki mentions that it was the belief of some Anglos that Chicanos were better suited than whites to work in the fields as Chicanos could more easily bend over. I wrote in the margin "Oak Harbor," or the name of my hometown. I wrote the name of my hometown because as a child, I vividly remember the Mexican immigrants who flooded my small, rural town to work in the fields during the summer. At the time, I didn't think much about the existence of the immigrants. My mother, in fact, taught them during summer school, spending a tremendous amount of time and energy working with them. What I realized later, though, is that the immigrants worked long, hard hours in the fields (whenever I acted up, my mother always threatened to put me side by side with them in the fields to teach me a lesson) and were paid very little. It was, in essence, glorified slavery. Takaki's discussion not only reminded of my past, but I wrote questions in the margin such as "has their position in society changed much" and "have immigrants just replaced fields with other forms of manual, low paying labor?" In short, I was reflecting on the current status of immigrants and if anything has really changed.



For my lesson, I would have my students read Takaki's discussion on how easy it was for Chicanos to cross the border and compare it to what immigrants crossing the border experience today. I have a friend who is a Border Patrol Agent in Yuma, Arizona who possesses video clips of what exactly occurs on the US/Mexican border. The clips I have seen contain acts of violence, drug smuggling, gun toting, and other shocking footage which illustrates how dangerous crossing the border has become and to what extreme immigrants are willing to go to fulfill their dream of entering the US. I would then follow up the footage by presenting arguments made by presidential candidates about how to operate the border and ask students to write an essay on what they would do to solve the border crisis.