Rain of Gold Term Paper

Perseverance through Faith and Family into the New World The book Rain of Gold by Victor Villasenor portrays the life of his ancestors and their families from both sides of his family, his father, Juan Salvador Villasenor, and his mother, Maria Guadalupe "Lupe" Gomez. The book shows the story of his parents and their journeys to the United States across the border as undocumented immigrants from Mexico in an effort to escape the Revolution of 1910. The book depicts the differences between the two families ' difficult journeys of survival yet, portrays their similarities and how their journeys culminate in the joining of the two families through the marriage of the youngest son of the Villasenor family and the youngest daughter of the Gomez family. The two families experience contrasting journeys as Juan 's family was poor in Mexico after once being rich, however, in the United States, his family becomes better off due to Juan 's entrepreneurial activities. Meanwhile, Lupe 's family does not experience the same fortune as they leave Mexico as a lower-middle class family that supported itself through its serving food to miners and occasional finding of gold, and they are not able to obtain economic prosperity when crossing into the United States and struggle to settle down and are continuously moving as they work in the fields picking crops from one place to another following the harvest. Despite the difficulties that these two Mexican families suffer in their attempt to escape the Revolution and in their hope of a better life in the United States, Rain of Gold depicts the social and economic struggles of Mexican families and the prejudice they experience in the United States and how Mexican immigration is similar to African immigration as well as Chinese and Japanese immigration into the United States.
Prior to both families ' immigration to the United States, Juan and Lupe 's families are centered around their mothers, that are the ejes de sus familias, from

Bibliography: Murrin, et al. Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People. Belmont, CA: Thomson-Wadsworth, 2008. Villasenor, Victor. Rain of Gold. New York, NY: Dell Publishing, 1991.