450 Years Of Chicano History In Pictures Summary

I interpret Baca's view of education at the age of seven to be similar to the way Jewish victims viewed Adolf Hitler during the Holocaust. "Teachers had been punishing me for not knowing my lessons by making me stick my nose in a circle chalked on the blackboard" (Baca 4). Baca felt deep-seated shame for not comprehending the information presented to him. Fear and shame were like ropes wrapping around his limbs, pinning them to his body, binding him to literary dullness. Baca wanted his existence to be vindicated. Baca likened himself to the Mexican peasants he viewed in, "450 Years of Chicano History in Pictures" (1). Baca found the validity he'd been grappling for in those barbarous and inequitable illustrations of oppression. Baca's view …show more content…
Baca wants to pull his readers into the enrapturing web he weaves within the vivid pictures he paints and somewhat relatable stories of the sting of pull and tug. 3. I cannot pick just one, but there are two I hold above the others: vivid detail and physical description. Baca paints such an arresting picture with the way he wields words so unorthodoxly. "My tongue would not move, saliva drooled from the corners of my mouth. I had been so heavily medicated I could not summon the slightest gesture. Yet inside me a small voice cried out, I am fine! I am hurt now but I will come back! I am fine (Baca 10)! I can relate to the desperation in that expression of raw emotion, "I am fine! I am hurt now but I will come back!" We rise and we fall. Nature can be unrelenting. What causes your world to wither and die can be the same thing that causes your world to burst into life again. "I wrote the way I wept, and danced, and made love" (Baca 11). Baca's descriptions bring me back to the words in Cherry Wine by Hozier, how the sound of someone's fingers rake across the guitar strings and his voice pierces through my