Entry Blog #1 Chapter One

It might be easy to look at Robert Frost's "Immigrants" as a white male-chauvinist patting white folk on the back about their immigration from Anglo-Saxon Europe to found a New World.  Also, it might be easy to look at Pat Mora's "Immigrants" as a non-white female worrying about the Other while discussing immigration.  Both poems discuss immigration, but from different perspectives.

Robert Frost wrote his poem for a pageant in 1920, at Plymouth, Massachusetts to celebrate the Mayflower.  Would he have written the poem differently if it had been for an Iroquois celebration?  His poem ignores the Native Americans who called America home.  His poem ignores the disease and death that the Mayflower immigrants brought to the inhabitants of the New World.  He focuses on the celebration of the white dream exclusively.

On the other hand, Pat Mora, writing in 1986 from a Mexican-American's perspective, creates a poem in conflict between "hallo, babee, hallo," and the immigrants' dream to assimilate with the inhabitants of their New World.  She points out that the immigrants "wrap their babies in the American flag."

One thing both of these poems have in common is their treatment of the female gender.  Frost would ignore women and focus on his "Pilgrim manned" ships, and Mora would capitalize and celebrate the male child while using lower-case for the female child.