Poem Analysis: Mixed Race America

Mixed Race America The works of Child of the America’s by Aurora Levins Morales and What It’s Like to be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t) by Patricia Smith was because of the direct contrast of the statements “I am whole” in Morales poem verses “…and feeling like you’re not finished” in Smith’s poem. Both statements in these poems are strong, stating a completion of a human soul and both poems are in agreement that race is a part of the completion to the human soul. Levins Morales’ poem explains what it is really like to be of mixed race in America. Smith’s poem gives a deep, more individual approach of what it is like to be a black girl. Race is a background for both poems. Race and ethnicity have drastically changed in the last half-decade, due to attitudes and issues changing and America has become one great melting pot of culture and race. Over the last 50 years, our culture has changed due to interracial relations and immigration. Immigration truly came to America through Ellis Island in the 1800’s when immigrants were settling through New York. In Child of the Americas the narrator makes reference of this in the statement, “a product of the ghettos of New York I have never known.” Back then, cultures were so vastly different that people stayed
Ironically, the narrator in Levins Morales’ poem is of mixed raced, but is at an acceptance with who and what she is, and accepts that she is new and embraces it. The narrator in Smith’s poem is of a clearly defined race, but there is a sense of struggle in what she projects her life to be like. Both poems ' are full of symbolism, but the tone of the poems is in direct contrast with each other. Both poems ' content is spoken form a first-person point of view, and while one poem has a plot of the journey of a woman, the other poem speaks of a woman who is free and knows herself through her many cultures, regardless of a