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Evan Belk

Professor Zapata

CAS 115

12 October, 2018

Class and Life Experiences

Attending the Central American Studies class has been a new experience for me in a variety of

ways. The first picture shown below is of my family and I on the night of my graduation from high

school. Raised in a small, liberal town in Northern California by a white, middle class, college educated

family, my move to Southern California has brought on a lot of new sights and opportunities for growth.

The fact that my background, as compared to the backgrounds of many others in the class, is not alike,

has allowed me to appreciate some of the the real life stories recounted by my fellow students. This

appreciation was something I could not have gained just by doing readings assigned. Rather, it was

something that came about when I understood what I was reading and then heard it connected to the lives,

cultures, and identities of my peers. This is what has made this class unique. The writing assignments are

nothing astoundingly new to me, as I have been taking english courses through the entirety of my

academic life; the class atmosphere, however, is something I am not used to, due to the fact that the town

where I came from has a very different racial and ethnic demographic than the CSUN campus. This new

atmosphere is something I am thankful for as it contributes to my personal growth and gives me a broader

perspective on life. While the content covered throughout this course may not connect directly to what I

have personally experienced, I do really enjoy hearing how it connects to the lives of my peers. This has

also forced me to search harder to find connections, indirect as they may be, between my own life and the

readings we have done as a class.

Of the readings that have been assigned in class, the ones I have enjoyed most have been out of

the book “...After…” by Carolina Escamilla. The way that Escamilla uses imagery and creative language
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to tell a story engages the reader and allows them to become absorbed in the events of the story, including

all of its individual characters. The book itself is very cleverly put together in the sense that it features the

same characters throughout its entirety, but at different points in time and from different perspectives, and

all within the context of El Salvador during its civil war. The way that each short story is intricately

woven with the others is something very impressive to me and each new story read feels like another

piece of a sort of quilt that Escamilla is weaving, depicting community life in a war torn developing

country. The second image below was taken when I traveled to Nicaragua in the summer of 2016 with a

group called Seeds of Learning with which we worked in rural villages to build schools for the children

living there. The whole experience was incredibly eye opening, as I got to observe and become immersed

in the daily life and cultural practices of the people in a developing Central American country. Many of

the villages I visited had gained access to electricity and running water for the first time in the last five

years. Standing in the picture with me is a man named Modesto who I met at a village at which we

worked. As a young boy, he had been abandoned by his parents and had to survive the Nicaraguan

revolution in the 1980’s along with his younger brothers and sisters, whom he had to keep safe from the

military. He did this by hiding them in caves he found in the mountains and bringing food to them there.

There is a strong connection the circumstances of his incredible story and what I have learned about the

civil unrest in the Central American country of El Salvador, which also took place during the 1980’s. El

Salvador as well, was in a situation where safety was a serious concern for its citizens, requiring them to

take extreme measures in many cases to fight for the wellbeing of their families. Though El Salvador

today remains relatively stable politically, this is unfortunately not the case for Nicaragua. This past

summer, I had planned another trip through the same organization that had to be canceled due to political

instability and protests by many of the citizens that often turned violent.

Though perhaps not as smooth of a read as some others we were assigned, the work that was the

most informative for me was “Undocumented Latinas: The New Employable Mother”. The unfair
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practices of the INS when it came to regulations that discriminated on basis of race and sex were

something that I was completely unaware of in the past. It seemed absurd to me that they could have

gotten away for so long with their interpretation of the ​Immigrant Reform and Control Act of 1986

provisions that clearly made it difficult for unemployed, undocumented hispanic or latina women to gain

citizenship and a better life in their families. To have to choose between public benefits necessary for

survival and citizenship was a completely unfair position to put these women in. White women on the

other hand, were benefiting from the helpless position that these undocumented women were put in. All

these middle class white working mothers cared about was the money they were saving, not the human

suffering that was occurring, which was made possible by the INS who wanted to maintain the dominant

position that white women held in society.. The third picture below was taken at an anti-gun rally in

Sacramento that I attended. It took place shortly after the horrific tragedy that was the Parkland High

School shooting, and was also a response to the multiple others that had occurred at that point in 2018

alone. A big protest point at this rally, which marched with an enormous crown to the capitol steps, was

the way that politicians, while sending their “thoughts and prayers” to shooting victims, would never

actually make an effort to regulate firearms because of the money they received from the NRA. This was

another instance of government corruption in which individuals were benefited monetarily in spite of the

suffering of others. Those others, of course, being the victims of the shootings and their families. In

“Undocumented Latinas: The New Employable Mothers”, the victims were the undocumented hispanic

and latina women, while those benefiting monetarily from their suffering were the white middle class

mothers. I was able to learn through this article about yet another case of the unfair practices of the

government, which I had seen before in the context of something like gun control, but it had never been

put into the light of undocumented immigrants before this class.

This course has taught me a lot about Central American identity, immigration, culture, and other

issues inhabitants of those countries face today. A region of the world I was completely unfamiliar with
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beforehand, I now have a much clearer picture of in my mind. Though I am grateful for this new

knowledge I have acquired, I do wish that the class had focused a lot more on writing and composition.

The amount of work in terms of writing assignments so far this semester were definitely more than I had

in high school english classes, and that has helped me in some ways to get more comfortable putting my

thoughts onto paper in a meaningful or persuasive way, but I was hoping that we would work more in

class on what makes a good paper. Maybe strategies or tips and examples of great essays or other pieces

of work, to be analyzed with the class. Though I am reasonably confident in my ability to write, I see a lot

of it’s rough edges and know that it is a skill that could be honed and perfected if given the proper

guidance.

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