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RA Essay Outline (Sources! (Ocean Vuong's "A Letter to My Mother…

- - - - Vuong's relationship with his mother is affected negatively by his mother's uncontrollable spurts of violence from her PTSD.
        
        "The first time you hit me, I must have been four. A hand, a flash, a reckoning. My mouth a blaze of touch" (Vuong 3).
      - Vuong uses a long running analogy with his audience to explain his relationship with his mother eloquently, and to show his appreciation of her.
      - Vuong's childhood was centered around his mother's need to blend in and become a part of the American system.
        
        "In the egalitarian, sanitized, temperature-controlled space of the mall, isolated from the context of one's life, one gets to reinvent one's past, oneself. And that's what we did" (Vuong 5).
  - - - Very detailed use of metaphors and analogies to capture attention of both academic and public audiences.
        
        "The dentist is cleaning out my roots. I get a whiff of the stench when I gasp. 'I can't cap that tooth yet, you're still draining,' he says. 'We're going to have to do something about your tongue" (Anzaldua 33).
      - Both authors and their families are products of the American System and how they treat immigrants.
        
        White oppression in America plays a huge role in shaping both mindsets of the authors.
        
        "The first time you came to my poetry reading. After, while to room stood and clapped, I walked back to my seat beside you. You clutched my hand, your eyes red and wet, and said, I never thought I'd live to see so many old white people clapping for my son. I didn't understand until, weeks later, I visited you at the nail salon and watched as you knelt, head bent, washing the feet of one old white woman after another" (Vuong 4).
        
        Both Anzaldua and Vuong struggle with conforming to the system set in place by American Society. Vuong's mother and Anzaldua try their best to blend in, yet in both readings the audience sees that the individuals are very different from the rest of America during this time period.
    - - Restricted from Speaking Spanish In School
        
        Stopped her from being fully immersed in any one culture, therefore became caught between two separate cultures. Impacted her identity and forced her to create her own identity.
      - Identity is tied closely to Language, Music, and Experiences
        
        "For me food and certain smells are tied to my identity, to my homeland. Woodsmoke curling up to an immense blue sky; woodsmoke perfuming my grandmother's clothes, her skin" (Anzaldua 42).
      - Rejection from her own culture because she is forced to speak English
        
        "'Pocho, cultural traitor; you're speaking the oppressor's language by speaking English, you're ruining the Spanish language,' I have been accused by various Latinos and Latinas" (Anzaldua 35).
- - - - Vuong uses his platform on Mother's Day in the New Yorker to give a tribute to his mother, but more importantly address the problems with American society and how the war affected his mother and other immigrants.
      - Anzaldua uses her platform in her textbook to inform the audience of her background, and her firsthand experiences growing up in America. She uses clever writing to engage the audience (Spanish and English), and addresses how immigrant identity is affected with the policies set in place by the American government.