AP12 English
January 27, 2015
Free Write
Self-Portrait
Look at the portrait on page 531
and answer questions 2 and 3.
Make sure you are writing the whole
time and answering the questions
thoroughly and reflectively.
Independent Reading
20-25 minutes
Reminder: In order to receive daily SSR
points you must be present and on task.
That means NO sleeping, doing homework,
leaving the classroom for restroom/library,
talking, distracting others, etc.
Quiz
Go to Google Classroom and
complete the quiz over
“Mexicans Begin Jogging”
YOU CANNOT USE YOUR
BOOK!
Class Discussion
Speaker works in a factory alongside several illegal
Mexican workers. His boss assumes since he’s Mexican,
he must be illegal, too.
When the factory was raided his boss told him to run
with the others and didn’t believe that he was legal.
While the speaker is running he’s reflecting on the
situation, finding the humor and irony in it.
Class Discussion
The place of work is described in terms that convey danger.
A hot oven “yellow with flame”. A fleck of rubber threatens
to sear unprotected human flesh, and the press ominously
suggests its power to crush the unwary.
As he vacates the factory, the speaker runs through a
different environment. The houses are the locus of the
European American mainstream—of baseball and
milkshakes. Inhabitants of the house are “soft” that they
blanch as colors change at sunset. (This is the speaker’s way
of describing how they respond to people of color rather
than actual nightfall.)
Class Discussion
•
Soto’s use of the “back door” is figurative and evokes the common
expression “a backdoor worker” referring to those who are
employed illegally or a back-door deal is one in which parties
transact business in a concealed manner, usually illegal
transactions.
•
“Since I was on time” is a reference to the way in which worker’s
wages are often calculated in factory environments. Workers
punch in to mark the time at which them begin and end working.
Technically, since there is no time to punch out, the clock
measuring the speaker’s hours at the factory is still running.
Class Discussion
The line “sociologists/Who would clock me” grows out of
the factory-time-clock idea and modifies it. Sociologists
literally measure and quantify data to reach conclusions
about issues such as illegal immigration, but Soto’s phrasing
here conjures up images of the sociologists timing his
running which gives a comedic effect.
The reference to the speaker being “the wag to a short tail of
Mexicans” paints a picture of the workers fleeing in single
file to evade arrest. “Wag” also means jokester, playing on
Soto’s serious claim that he was not illegal, which his boss
didn’t believe.
Class Discussion
Clearly, the “jogging” of the title overlays the
predominantly middle-class recreational activity of
jogging onto the stereotype of the perpetually running
illegal Mexican immigrant.
Comedy emerges through the ironies, contrasts, and
deliberate double entendres noted, but also in the way
the poem ridicules the mainstream and its complacent
generalizations and gestures. There is something a little
disturbing, for example, about the boss’s knowledge of
the grave danger his workers may be in if arrested, and
his mingy proffering of a goodwill dollar.
Class Discussion
The “power” of that grin is the speaker’s mischievous
acknowledgment that the situation is not as desperate
or as serious as he at first represented it. The grin is
augmented by the fact that the speaker has eluded
something other than the border patrol: he has eluded
the identity that others would foist upon him by virtue
of the simple fact that he is Mexican.
The smile at the end of the poem is a warm, playful
reminder that when bodies like the border patrol
police national borders, they also police the boundaries
of identity.
Class Discussion
The conflict in the speaker is overcome rather swiftly
and easily—at least as far as this incident goes. He first
feels the need to assert that he is American. He is then
faced with the imputation that all illegal Mexicans lie
about citizenship. Rather than challenging this
imputation, he manages to shrug it off by making the
boss the butt of his joke rather than allowing the boss
to make him the butt of the boss’s stereotype.
The speaker concludes that it is not his responsibility
to disabuse the ignorant.
Class Discussion
The title is extremely clever in the way that it marshals a
common stereotype of the illegal Mexican immigrant
perpetually running from the authorities. Soto crosses this
idea with jogging, often identified with the middle-class,
wealthy Anglo-Saxon-American suburbs.
This idea of jogging, juxtaposed with what the Mexicans are
actually doing—running from the border patrol—highlights
how the same actions, performed by people from different
economic and ethnic backgrounds, can mean totally
different things. The humor of the poem is amplified by the
use of “Jogging” in the title. Titling the poem “Mexicans
Begin Running”—a more literal description—would lose the
comic irony.
Homework
•
Read “Powwow” by Sherman Alexie (pg.
520) and complete the “Reading
Comprehension Summary” sheet over the
text by sentences.
• Go to Google Classroom and answer
questions #2, 3, 4, 5, 7 under “Exploring
the Text” on pg. 520.