Part 1

Responding to Words in Context

1. In the Valley, no one will care that “the slivered self- identifications”. It’s not an important of people’s lives in Fresno.

  In author’s opinion, self-identification is very important in our lives. He also provides the evidence “the identification of name” to expand his opinion.

2. One reason is that some parents and a lot of children cannot pronounce their names correctly. When they hear the right name, they will feel confused and embarrassed. On the other hand, there’s an opinion that “people who speak their name in Spanish always should be under-educated, illegal immigrant and work a bilingual program.” Therefore, in public, even the author’s stepfather uses the English name “Tony”. Those reasons above causes them act as accomplices to everyone in the Valley.

3. Corrosive is an adjective that a corrosive liquid such as an acid can weaken and destroy thing possibly.

He explains this situation. English is the language using by people all over the world. The power of English culture which seems like the acid is going to destroy the Hispanic culture.

Discussing Main Point and Meaning

1.     In his opinion, he thinks that changing the pronunciation not only change the sound but also change the culture knowledge and identity.

     When names are Anglicized, the names will lose a lot of knowledge and identification in their original cultural background.

2. His stepfather just didn’t have enough resistance. In his opinion, he may think English was a world of power and decision. Everyone tends to use English names so that he follows the crowd. The different motivation is that he didn’t just change to use English name for work.

3. They need time to transfer words at the beginning. Later, they accept both language and learn English language new meaning and constrictions. He interprets her as a common agent such as those agents in California.

Examining Sentences, Paragraphs, and Organization

1 The airport agent’s Anglicized pronunciation can support the argument of the article about the “Anglicized”

2. Those names are Spanish names but people will all pronounce in English way.

3. More names can be more specific in his argument. He wants to show reader that “There are commonly happening in our world.”

Thinking Critically

1 .The reason is that a lot of children don’t exactly know the pronunciations and meaning of their names. On the other hand, people think that people who say their names in Spanish are always immigrants and lack of English Skills. Therefore, students are ashamed to say their names in Spanish way.

2. Many people are living in big cities and they are speaking their own language. They are proud to say their native language in their community. Compared with those people, the author feel embarrassed to talk about his language and his own history. He feels his language have lost the meaning and spirit. So at college, the author avoided meeting people. In his mind, he didn’t proud of his own language.

3. He assumes that missing people depend on his cultural background and experience. His point is that people who are living that small city always don’t know how to pronounce right. At the end he reproaches himself, because author thinks people cannot change their names people but can board their views to leave the small city.

Part 2

Author: Manuel Munoz

Title: Leave Your Name at the Border

From: New York Time/ August 1, 2007

Main idea of paragraph:

1. At the Fresno airport, I was interested in a name which was calling over the intercom by the gate agent who had Mexican accent.
2. The gate agent was a Mexican woman who was well- coiffed, in her 30s; she wore foundation to camouflage herself.
3. I watched the Mexican gate agent busy herself at the count, professional and studied.
4. Her Anglicized pronunciation wouldn’t be unusual because I didn’t have Mexican name either.
5. There are two groups, white and Mexican, live in Fresno.
6. I was born in 1970, part of a generation that learned both English and Spanish.
7. It is intriguing to watch “American” name begin to dominate among my relative and the children of my hometown friends.
8. Spanish was and still is viewed with suspicion as part of a lower class.
9. Something as simple as say our name “in English” was our unwittingly complicit gesture of trying to blend in.
10. .One of my teachers who is a white man cares the language we speak.
11. .There were difficult names for a non-Spanish speaker.
12. .Ours were names that stood as barriers to a complete embrace of an American identity.
13. .My stepfather jokes when I ask him about the names of Mexicans born here.
14. .My stepfather’s experience with the Anglicization of his name – Antonio to Tony – ties into something bigger than learning English.
15. .Every gesture made toward convincing an employer that English was on its way to being mastered had the potential to make a season of fieldwork profitable.
16. .It’s curious that many of us growing up in Dinuba adhered to the same rules.
17. .The corrosive effect of assimilation is the displacement of one culture over another, the inability to sustain more than one way of being.
18. .I was confronted for the first time by people who said my name correctly without prompting.
19. .Language is all about manipulation, or not listening to the rules.
20. .Leaving a small town requires an embrace of a large point of view, but a town like Dinuba remains forever embedded in an either/or why of life.
21. .My name is Manuel, name by an uncle whom I had never met. I can live with my name because I love the alliteration of my full name.
22. .I count on a collective sense of culture loss to once again swing the names back to our nation language.
23. .I allowed the language rules, so I have to leave, and people such as my stepfather who don’t allow changing and only can stay in the valley.

Ideas I find most compelling is that what the correct pronunciation is.

Ideas I think this article is connected to Mexican American define themselves by name.

I need to do more research in the language of Spanish.

Part 3

Summary:

In “Leave Your Name at the Border” the author states that he is a Mexican American living in a small California town. He explores the complications that arise when people try to assimilate to a new culture, through the lens of very literal form of identity: name. Growing up, he and his peers spoke English at school and Spanish at home. As a result, “Spanish was for privacy – and privacy quickly turn to shame”. He also links this feeling to a recent trend that disturbs him: his family has begun giving their children American names like “Brandon” or “Kaitlyn”, while old- fashioned Mexican names disappear. There is one thing I feel interesting for the author, his unmistakably Mexican first name was always a mark of his roots. And an obstacle to the melting pot: traditional names “stood as barriers to a complete embrace of an American identity, simply because their pronunciations required a slip into Spanish, the otherness that assimilation was supposed to erase.”  But I don’t know that does an American name really represent a loss of identity? We have to think about that.