The Immigrant Experience and the Way Out

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Fredrick.O. Adeyemi The Immigrant Experience and the Way out “Puerto Rican Obituary” is a poem about Puerto Rican immigrants and their misfortune in hope of finding the American dream. Pedro Pietri uses the poem to urge the immigrants to maintain their identity rather than re-birth themselves into the American culture which has nothing to offer them. He encourages them to keep their language and culture and promote relations among themselves in order to build a community. Pietri encourages the immigrants to keep their language alive. That is, they should not change their language for any reason. He speaks further that the language will help them to have a close relationship among themselves. Accepting American language creates hatred among them when they compare how better they can speak English among themselves. As pietri writes, ”Manuel/died hating all of them/Juan/Miguel/Milagros/and Olga/because they all speak broken english/more fluently than he did”(54). Pietri sees same language as the thing that brings people together, and the language can be transferred from generation to generation. That is to say one generation can easily identify another generation when they speak the same language. However, these immigrants are keeping their hope in America while assimilating themselves to the American language in order to reap American dream which Pietri describes as fallacy. If the immigrants kept their language, it would help them to maintain their values and norms, when they speak the same language. It will enable them to think about their own culture rather than accepting American culture which has nothing for them. He shares more light on this when he warn the immigrants to stop separating themselves from the language that they belong to. It can be seen when Pietri points out,” they are dead/and will not return from the dead/until

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