The analysis of the play Los Vendidos by Luis Valdez Research Paper

The analysis of the play Los Vendidos by Luis Valdez - Research Paper Example The treatment of immigrants is surely different in every part of the world. A few welcome the new comers while mostly welcome them by taunts, sarcastic remarks, laughter, irony, and amusement. This becomes quiet irritating for the people who are already new in a certain setup, environment and people. The best behavior of the neighbors adds to their annoyance and frustration. It is not that they do not respect the cultures and the traditions around; it’s just that they need time to settle and get accustomed to the rituals. Most of the people, of the threat of being discriminated, try to change their nationality and identity. The past which they tend to forget is the most threatening thing for them and for their culture. They try to eradicate themselves as the citizens of their previous land and try to make new identities by merging into the society. This is a great threat to all the cultures and civilizations. However, the people who refuse to amalgamate in a new costume always are the target of the degradation and humiliation and that is what makes their refusal and resistance more powerful. (Velazquez, 1997). If the heritage and the culture are lost then there is nothing left either for them or for their children to claim any hierarchy or property or values, ethics or traditions. 2.2 The ways that Los Vendidos reveals the problem: The one-act play Los Vendidos reveals the truth and the facts within our society. The racism though is everywhere yet is always denied. Valdez portrays the behavior of

Devil in the White City Essay Example for Free

Devil in the White City Essay The Devil in the White City takes two aspects that rose in Chicago during the late 1880s and the early 1890s and interlocks them. The World Fair did not just bring millions of people to the city, it brought optimism. Even though Chicago became magnificent through the Fair, it still remained in a mind frame of racism, inequality of gender, separation of social class, and countless murders. The story of the White City of Chicago enhances the story of the Devil, H. H. Holmes, who found contentment within its walls and created a downfall of humanism all on his own. Daniel Burnham and John Root created the White City with the help of many architects from New York, Boston, St. Louis and Chicago. Burnham focused on the public relations so he mainly found the work and also took care of the money coming in. On the other side, Root was an innovator. He drew the blueprints and built what Root had agreed to do. Throughout many challenges, and tragedy, both men planned the building of the White City and enhanced its landscape. The White City was given to the 1893 Worlds Exposition celebrating Columbus discovery of America. The city of Chicago was given the honor of hosting the extravagant affair. Many people remained anxious, thinking that the Exposition would not excel a county fair, because they only envisioned Chicago as just an uncultured, meatpacking city and nothing more. But then the news came and Chicago was to be the host; the people of Chicago were ecstatic. They could finally show everyone they were as cultured and civilized as New York and maybe even better. Upon this great news, the firm of Burnham and Root was given the task of creating the Exposition grounds. The task had to be completed in approximately three years to be ready for the Dedication Ceremony and Opening Day. Three of their major obstacles were the location of the Exposition, its planning and design of the Exposition. It took them almost six months to decide on a location, so they only had two years and a half to design the building and landscape and then build the final product. It appeared to be an impossible task at the time. As soon as one challenge was met, three more would arise. One of the most prominent challenges was to create something that was comparable or preferably better than the Eiffel Tower, which was built for the Paris Exposition. America wanted the world to know that it could have a better World Fair Exposition than anything that had been done before. Other issues included the continued possibility of strikes from the workers, fighting committees for the approval of everything, deciding who would design the buildings and landscape, the economy, which was on the verge of collapsing during this period, and the power struggle between the National Committee for the Exposition and the Exposition Company. Everything was always behind schedule or at least appeared to but all of the architects from New York, Boston, Chicago and St stepped up to the plate. The workers, even with impending strikes, felt the patriotic spirit and worked harder and faster to finish their job. Burnham and his crew got the exposition grounds ready for the Dedication Ceremony, which was about one month before opening day. Things still needed to be completed, but it was closer to being done than anyone had expected. On Opening Day, things still needed to be accomplished but in general the fair had been completed. The Ferris wheel, Americas response to the Eiffel Tower, opened 51 days late, but from the day of its first rotation, people were enamored with the wheel. The landscape was not entirely done but it went on to be completed within the next couple of weeks. The maintenance of the wheel continued for the full six months that the fair was open. With many people out of work, this provided jobs for lots of poor families for a while. The World Fair Exposition was great because not only did it beautify Chicago but it also told the world that there is nothing American people could not do when they put their minds to it. As one critic said, â€Å"It was a common remark among visitors who saw the Fair for the first time that nothing they had read or seen pictured had given them an idea of it, or prepared them for what they saw† (Larson 255). The Fair ended up by being far impressive and more influential than anyone had ever imagined. The downside of this success is that this was a celebration of â€Å"white† America, the majority of the population, not all of America. Frederick Douglass fought for the chance to present the progress African-Americans had made since the end of slavery but they, the owners, wanted only to exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage and nothing else. As Douglass once said, â€Å"America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. † There were no blacks in the Exposition at all. The World Fair had a Colored People’s Day during which Native Americans would be half-naked and equipped with arrows to portray them as a lesser class as the whites. With its glory, the World Fair Exposition brought with it racism. It was ruled by the politics of rage. If the blacks had been represented, one could say that the Civil Rights movement would have happened a lot earlier than the 1960s because many people would have seen their progress since slavery and the blacks would have demanded to be treated as equals. There was also an issue of gender even before the Fair had started. During the building of the World Fair, women were not included as workers at all. They were expected to stay at home to take care of the kids and have dinner on the table when their husbands returned from work. They were treated as if all they could do was to stay at home and were incapable of bringing money in the family or take care of it financially. Another major setback was the separation of the social class. Only the upper class white men were allowed to show off what they had and everyone else was limited. Whites were portrayed as rich, powerful, and fearless during the parade while the lower and inferior class, such as African-Americans and Native Americans, were being restricted to take part of the white city. At the end of the Exposition Grounds, on the corner of Wallace and 63rd Streets, H. H. Holmes started making his plans. He had started his criminal life with insurance fraud, but found the killing part to be the most fun and exciting. He built his castle to feed his obsession, and once he discovered that the Exposition was coming to Chicago, it made his castle much more important. People, mainly women, would come to him for employment and after he gave them a job, he made sure it was their last job by killing them and selling their corpses to colleges to make money. His â€Å"castle† allowed him to commit murder at his leisure without anyone knowing about it. Before the Exposition opened, Holmes had already begun his killings. He used his charms and his intelligence to lure women into thinking that he was an ordinary man. He seduced women his looks and then killed them and their children. He continued this hobby until just before the close of the Exposition. It was said that he killed approximately 200 men, women and children; however, the courts could only prove nine actual killings due to the fact that only small bone fragments remained in the three-story house castle and the bones that were recovered from his torturous rampage could not be used to identify who the dead people due to the lack of technology. H. H. Holmes had been incarcerated on insurance fraud charges when the Pinkerton Detective Agency started probing into the disappearance of his best friend, whom he had killed so he could collect the life insurance. Battle tested, the Agency ended up by catching up with Holmes. By then a lot of people were missing or dead but it should not have been this way because he could have caught earlier but H. H. Holmes moved faster than society and society was not ready for him. The time he lived in aided him tremendously. A train trip took a couple of weeks to reach their destinations so it was not natural not to here from a relative for a long time and this made it impossible for one to know if the person was actually missing. Most of his victims were women because once they arrived in Chicago for the World Fair; they had no idea where to stay so they stayed at the Castle. As H. H. Holmes said, â€Å"I was born with the Devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing† (Larson 109) Based on this quote, one would say that Holmes did not require a motive to do what he took part in because he was already a sociopath who waited for the perfect time to strike and based his entirely life around murders and making money by selling corpses. H. H. Holmes affected more people’s lives during the Fair than the actual World Fair itself because he was not like Jack the Ripper; He was a cold-blooded murderer and sociopath that lived just a few blocks down the road. He inserting fear in the heart of every woman in Chicago and forced Detective Agencies to catch up with him by inventing the â€Å"mug shot. † One would agree with his statement because during this gruesome period, Holmes did not show any emotions for anyone that he took a life from. It seems as if he never had a goal in life so once he had this mind-blowing idea, he stuck to it and exiled himself from humanity. The fact that he also went to college and finished medical school proves that this man is more than capable of being smart but all he knew how to do was to be a Devil. Throughout The Devil in the White City, Larson does a great job by telling us that one cannot choose what he wants and avoid or disregard the rest because it will catch up sooner or later. To a certain point, Larson is emphasizing that H. H. Holmes would have never been so successful with all his killings if the World Fair Exposition had not taken place. He certainly would have had fewer victims and could have definitely been caught earlier. America, presumably Chicago, wanted to outdo Paris and thought that things such as the gruesome murders that were happening in London would never reach their home towns. At the end, America did better at both ends because they did a lot better than the Paris Exposition and they also inherited H. H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer. This book was very gripping and many of the things were quite surprising and unbelievable to say the least. It maintained a perfect balance of the World Fair Exposition and the introduction of America’s first serial killer. I would definitely urge others to pick this up and ready themselves for a train ride because it keeps you on the edge and envelops you with the endless details. REFERENCES Larson, Erik. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. New York: Crown, 2003. Borowski, John. H. H. Holmes America’s First Serial Killer: The Castle, the Murders, the Monster. Film Festival 2004.

Enlightenment Essay -- History, Slaves, Puritans

The period of Enlightenment in America was host to a society that widely accepted the practice of slavery. It was a custom that was looked favorably upon by most; especially in the South where the economy would have collapsed without it (Davis 1). The slaves were not all cooperative with their bondage however, and there were revolts such as the Stono Rebellion in 1739 (â€Å"Stono Rebellion† Aptheker 1). The treatment of the slaves altered according to their masters severity and the general laws of the area they worked in. Slavery was a struggling debate during the 18th century, and the differing views ended with the Revolutionary War that lasted during 1775 to 1783. Slavery was widely accepted in America during the 1700s. It was an efficient method for farmers and landowners to receive the workers they needed to tend their land and animals. Because of the time period and current immigration boom, slaves often found themselves working with indentured servants. This mostly white majority of people came to America seeking a better life, but were bound to their masters who helped fund their way into the colonies ("New England slavery at the turn of the 18th century." Berlin 1). Indentured servants suffered at the hands of their masters; but unlike slaves, they were not treated as another species or being socially inferior (â€Å"New England† Berlin 1). Many Puritans were uncomfortable with the keeping of slaves and turned to the Bible as a way to justify the practice of human bondage (â€Å"New England† Berlin 1). One of the main conflicts of the Puritans was whether the slaves should be converted to Christianity. Those opposed to this position believed that blacks had no souls to save (â€Å"New England† Berlin 1). They also believed that conversio... ...pears that Jefferson’s gripes are mainly about African Americans rather than their position as slaves, and has the fear of inter-breeding between the whites and blacks. The Enlightenment era was made up of a vast majority of those who accepted slavery, but in the end lost their humanity. It proved a useful tool for farmers and land owners, and it also created much controversy in many topics including religion and human rights. Rebellions were raised and political debates were pursued, and in the end this masterful and inhumane ritual brought a united nation into civil war. Slavery was not a solution for a country so much as it was an ignorance to a race of people. America twisted it’s Puritan values and made them appear supportive of it’s misbehavior. It was not for many years that our nation realized it’s hypocrisy, and it took a war to reach an understanding.

Cognitive Aging Reflection Paper

Patrick Byrnes Dev. Psych 10/18/2012 Reflection on using it†¦or losing it In â€Å"what and When of Cognitive Aging† I immediately took issue with the fact that Salthouse used participants â€Å"recruited through newspaper advertisements, appeals to community groups†¦all with approximately 16 years of education†. I feel that this sampling would inherently create a sampling error. I feel that schooler was right in addressing the sub-groups of different types of work force variable plus time in work force.The participants in Salthouses study were anything but random, and never took into consideration the type of work (cognitive challenging or not) and amount of time in the workforce or whether still in the workforce. A group of doctors and professors might who worked well past legal retirement age might produce a much more varied result then say a group of business people, or factory workers. Although it should be noted that Schooler noted this in her paper and said that her finding were negative for impact of intellectual flexibility.I also take some issue with the coding for the â€Å"cigarette commercial† question posed by Schooler. While points were awarded for the person who could come up with both sides of an argument, and none for the person who could think of no reason, it does little to elaborate for the person who can only give one argument against the commercials seeing that would fit into today’s paradigm that cigarettes are a carcinogen and inherently bad for the user and nearby nonsmokers as well.Both papers it should be noted are based in cognitive psychology/theory. Relying heavily on scientific modeling and statistical evidence to use as evidence and draw conclusions from, in most all of the statistical models most of the data has been adjusted then sometime readjusted to accommodate multifactorial functions. Something one would not see with Freud, psychosocial studies, or classical conditioning, at least not to this degree and intricacy.Another idea that caught my attention was that the idea that some cognitive degradation will be camouflaged due to the fact that the aging adult modifies their behavior to overcome or avoid the growing deficiency. This would make it plausible for a type of â€Å"micro† black swan theory/event where surround family and friends did not see the ailing person’s disability until some calamitous event, only afterwards were all the signs actually seeable.

Modern Life vs Village Life Essay

Many towns and villages then are nothing more than suburbs today. By definition cities have larger populations than towns which are larger than villages, which is a major difference between modern life and village life. In today’s Modern life cities have an urban settlement with large populations where as villages were settlements of community with small populations. Modern life have many advantages over village, because city modern life facility are easily available, as telephone , gas , internet, schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, industries, factories, roads, airports, railway stations and many were most, but most village are deprived of these many facilities like many villages no facility of gas, telephone , roads, etc. â€Å"The Telephone,† Accawi offers an unpretentious description of how the modern world began its intrusion into a timeless and insulated culture, where â€Å"there was no real need for a calendar or a watch to keep track of the day, hours months, and years†. Read more: Essay on village life As Accawi says of village life:†we lived and loved and toiled and dies without ever needing to know what year it was, or even the time of day. † Village life is slow moving and more agriculturally based while city is the center for trade, commercial industry and education. Modern life is always on the go, there are many offers for pleasures, opportunities for jobs, if you have a good job you can live well. The village was a traditional place where everyone enjoyed life and being around each other. Although village life had its pleasure, but it also had its flaws. In village life there were more chances of dying then in modern life . Forexample health care wise, assistance is wasn’t always available in the village if someone was in danger they would of had to rely on their own resources. Medical help is more easily available in modern life. Villages were miles and miles away from the nearest hospital or police station. But in a city with EMS the nearest hospital or clinic is just a few seconds away. Mordern dangers like traffic are constant but it is rarely pointed out that villages had their dangers too. A child playing in a village park may get bit by an wild animal. Wild animals are more of a threat in villages and may carry disease. But to belive that village life is safer than modern isn’t necessarily true. A was a threat is a threat whereevery it occurs A village child may grow up with the appreciation of birds and the wonders of the out doors and miss out on priceless opportunites in the modern day life. Modern life may have its flaws, but the opportunity given outweighs them. Morden life may seem preferable to the village life, because of technology and large scenery, but there are some disadvantages too, the cost of the living is high in the city, the city is noisy, no fresh air nor pure water. So it is hard to live a healthy life. People living in cities are different but similar from people living in villages. It is normal to us that city life is more enjoyable than village life. From our prospective of modern life, city life is filled with a lot of advantages. This is because of the fact that there are a number of opportunities open to you in modern life . City life is provided with a lot of facilities too. The behavior of the people in village life is different from the people in modern life. The people in villages on the other hand are warm-hearted and friendly. People in villages are very helpful in nature whereas people living in cities tend to be more selfish in their attitude. Villagers accept you well where as modern life people tend not to. It’s quiet, peaceful and the air was fresh in the village life, employment was seasonal for example farming witch is similar to roofers in the modern life,during the rainy season and brick making in the dry season. Wages brung better way of living to many familes in the village life, villagers were able to trade things and purchase farming goods from farmers like we trade and purchase food from our modern day markets. But You would not find many facilities and opportunities in a village. Parents would be love to send their child to the city for higher studies rather than to villages. The city is filled with quality higher education institutions whereas villages do not have with high quality colleges and universities. As read in the ,the villagers did not have much, and technology was very new to them. Fore example they judged time by certain events that happened. The birth of someone important or earthquake would be enough to grasp time. The children would play in the streets and run errands for the grown ups for money. Accawi grew up in this town and he was quietly statisfied and happy with his life. He woundn’t be to kindly of change because he had fun without all the advantages of technology. Assuming everyone else was happy as well. However, when the telephone came, it changed their lives forever. The telephone brought so many opportunities for the villagers. As read in the text â€Å"the whole village would sit by the phone and wait for it to ring and bring them news, and opportunities to make money†. The people of Magdaluna fell in love with the phone. The crowd around the phone grew larger and larger. People would receive job and leave the village. This was upsetting to many people of Magdaluna, especially Accawi. . I can agree with Accawi,I miss my home town in Haiti, migrating to America was a lot to take in. Like Accawi I was so acostume to the way of living in Haiti, so similar to the village life in Magadluna. But once my father found a better job in America we moved out as soon as possible. facing a variety of finical problems crime, drugs, corruption, a troubled my town my father was overwhelmed and dissatisfied with the direction of our town. He believe life was better in the United States. Close to 70% of my town say that people who move from hatiti enjoy a better life in the U. S. And the vast majority of those who are in regular contact with friends and relatives living in the U. S. say those friends and relatives have largely achieved their goals.