Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Post 15: I am Joaquin

"I look at myself and see a part of me who rejects my father and my mother, and dissolves into the melting pot to disappear in shame. I sometimes sell my brother out and sometimes reclaim them as my own when society gives me token leadership... the reward of Kings and bloody revolutions designed to give the future the tools to grow"
Rodolfo Corky Gonzales

For Comm 300 we had to watch the short film I am Joaquin, based upon the poem written by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales. It was a powerful depiction of a culture that has been under attack by external and internal forces, similar to Native American culture, and has sustained serious damage in the process. I made a post on the discussion board for my class, stating that I had actually seen this performed years ago in my high school creative writing class. As mentioned in my post I compared this building and destruction of a culture over and over again to the symbolism of an etch a sketch. There was once a beautiful picture, but something fundamentally disastrous shook the picture up, leaving only fragments behind. The then current Chicano society, tried to put together the pieces of their heritage and create the picture again, only to have something else further shake the image and have cause for rebuilding.

All the years of this has left the Chicano people with very difficult situations to deal with in terms of properly representing itself in a society now seemingly all too willing to listen yet expecting immediate results and overnight solutions to hundreds of years of degradation.

It leaves me wondering how they can fix this problem. What can I do to help? I am hoping that as we read our current text Shot in America by Chon Noriega, I will have a better sense of the demands and needs of the Chicano nation and what I might do to help.

No comments:

Post a Comment