Dear Rio,
Congratulations! This letter is an accumulation of the successes you’ve achieved in English 1B this past quarter. In this particular English 1B course, you have explored the elusive California Dream and the hopes and promises it makes to many immigrants all over the world. By doing so, you were able to critically think about yourself, your generation, and those who surround you in context to the time, place, and culture you live in. You have learned a great deal about reading and writing and have learned what it means to critically think about the ideas that surround you on a daily basis. I would like to take the time to further reflect on the five essays you wrote throughout the quarter and on your journey as a writer in English 1B this fall
You started the course off with an in-class essay that focused on defining the elusive California Dream. You did this by analyzing Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust in which you found the paradox of the California Dream was filled with high hopes and enchanting promises that were met with disappointment and broken dreams. From this essay, you learned that the idea of California as a land of dreams and desires was driven in part by Hollywood’s projection of extreme wealth and extravagant lifestyle.
You then worked on an out-of-class essay that focused on images of the California Dream as portrayed in music. In writing this essay, you learned that many musicians have written songs of California and the dream it holds and each have done so in their own unique way. By doing a close reading of Natalie Merchant’s song, “San Andreas Fault,” you analyzed the duality that exists in the California dream as she juxtaposed the beautiful and promising imagery of California in the first half of the song to the more stark and harsh reality of the dream in the second half of the song. In all of the songs, novels, and images that were created of California all throughout history, California has often been “described in superlatives” (Rawls, 25), and this song paid homage to that very idea. In comparison to your last essay, you have since improved on the explanation portion of your writing.
In the next unit, California History and Native America, you learned about the history of California and the Original Californians through a new historicist approach. The Native Americans went through much racial oppression and mistreatment from the Spanish, and subsequently the Anglo-Americans. In writing your second out-of-class essay, you were able to identify the different literary conventions used in Deborah Miranda’s “Indian Cartography” and Wendy Rose’s “Itch Like Crazy: Resistance” to reflect on the loss of their rich culture, the dispossession of their ancestral lands, and the destruction of the Original California Dream.
On the issue of immigration in California, you worked on identifying fallacies for both sides of the argument. In particular, you focused on analyzing Yeh Ling Ling’s “State Needs a ‘Time Out’ from Mass Immigration” in which she placed the blame on immigrants for California’s state budgetary mess. As a solution, she called for a moratorium “on most categories of legal immigration” (94) until the problems have been resolved, however, you found most of her arguments fallacious in nature as they failed to provide substantial and conclusive evidence to prove that a moratorium on mass immigration was indeed the correct solution to California’s problems. It was with this essay in particular that you gained several useful tips to avoid committing fallacies in your own writing that has really helped strengthened your reading, writing, and critical thinking skills.
And lastly, in your final out-of-class essay, you focused on analyzing three different genres of art—the film, Crash; the novel, American Son; and the play, Bordertown—in order to get a better understanding of what it means to live in a multicultural California. You learned through this assignment that although California is culturally diverse, much racial and social tensions still exist amongst these different cultures as a result of perpetuated discrimination and negative stereotypes. If we are to try and live as a multicultural society, we must first believe that we are not as different as we think. Similar to the “Bald Man” in Bordertown, we need to envision a place where “race, creed, and religion do not matter” (18). The day we can learn to do this—to put away with discrimination, racism, and stereotypes—is the day we will have evolved into “our higher self” (Culture Clash 17) and will have learned what it means to be a truly multicultural society. True multiculturalism is still but a dream not yet realized in California. However, with more acceptance, communication, knowledge, and understanding of the different cultures in California, we can reach our potential and really learn what it means to live in a truly multicultural society.
This class has allowed you to develop and strengthen the skills you need as an engaged writer, a thoughtful writer, and a critical thinker. You will be able to apply these skills in all of your other classes to which you can develop essays that are more persuasive and powerful in argument and structure. Cheers to a job well done! Now go out and celebrate!
A California writer's cultural manifestations. 