We Are All One Race

Have you every treated badly because of your race? Was your skin color a problem for you in your life? That is what Leslie Marmon Silko talked about it in her article Fences Against Freedom. Silko’s article was divided to two parts. She wrote about people’s behaviors in the past with other people from different race and color. Then, she wrote about how the border patrol treat the immigrants badly just because their race or skin color. I will interpret Silko’s choices for her article because I think that if we find explanations to the writer choices we will have a better understanding to the text. I will be focusing on the reasons that made her choose the title “Fence Against Freedom” to tell the reader that freedom become hard to get for people who are from different race or different skin color and she kept repeating that she is “mixed ancestry” to show the reader that she knows what they are going through. When we look to the title that Silko chose for her article Fences Against Freedom, we can think of couple reasons might be behind her choice. From reading the article, Silko talked about the steel wall that U.S. government building between the U.S borders and the Mexican borders, and that is why she chose the word Fences (Silko 107). She talked about the border patrol and their checkpoints became everywhere and that what take people’s freedom by stopping them and searching them because they are from different race, and that’s why she chose the word Freedom (Silko 108). From that we can think of the meaning behind the title, which is that the border patrol are taking people’s freedom to travel freely in their own country as they used to do before. Also, she maybe meant by that generally that there is no freedom anymore for people who are from different race. Maybe she meant by Fences what are making people’s freedom hard. For example, people from different race or have different skin color they don’t have as much freedom as the people who are from

Cited: Silko, Leslie Marmon. "Fences Against Freedom." Yellow Woman and the Beauty of Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today. Touchstone, New York 1996. Pages 100-114.