The process of immigration has as many perspectives as it does joys and challenges. While we often read, watch, or hear about immigration from the perspective of immigrants themselves, the story does not start or stop with them. This paper uses José Martí's "Our America", Ernesto Galarza's Barrio Boy, and Jesús Colón's "Grandma, Please Don't Come!" to examine how the experience of immigration shapes the perspectives of those both inside and outside of the experience itself, and how these perspectives shape their responses to the immigration process.
The first piece, José Martí's 1891 essay “Our America”, looks at immigration from an unusual perspective: the perspective of the native people already inhabiting the land being migrated to.…