I chose this video because its about Washington Heights which is where I grew up. The whole movie is supposed to depict what being from there is from but the clip I chose in particular capture that everyone has a dream and has a pressure to be a hard worker. Many people want to work their way back to a good life in the Dominican Republic and some use the fact that they came from so far away that they can’t allow themselves to slack off.

I decided to go with the first section of the text. To go over the first section briefly, Anzaldua talks about a time when she goes to the dentist. While being there, the dentist made the remark that her tongue is stubborn. She turns this into a comparison of how people also want to suppress her language. She then talks about her experience in school. She was once caught speaking Spanish and got punished for it. When she tried correcting her teacher about the pronunciation of her name she was told to not “talk back”. She also faced this at the hands of her mother. Her mother was distraught that her daughter was speaking English like a “Mexican”. In school she was given two speech classes which she claimed were to get rid of her accent. In the end of the section, Anzaldua leaves with the remark that you can’t tame a tongue, you can only cut it.

There are many things to go over here. For example, starting off with the flashback to her in the dentist. Why did she do this? I believe she did this because she wanted to give the reader a literal example of someone trying to suppress her tongue before the examples of where people figuratively suppress her tongue. Although there is a difference of literal and figurative, I think a similarity lies within both examples. One similarity is that her tongue and language are both unpleasant to the people around her. She was able to tell that the dentist was beginning to become frustrated with her tongue, she also remarked that it did not smell good. Her language was unpleasant for her teachers, which is proven by the times she got it with a ruler for speaking Spanish, and when she is told to not “talk back” and that if she didn’t like it she should go “back to Mexico where she belongs”. I wonder why they find it so unpleasant, but we can use her getting hit with rulers as an indicator that this probably happened a while ago when discrimination was more prominent.

Another thing that stuck out to me was the phrase, “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out”. To me, this is confusing. Maybe it’s a perspective discrepancy. I don’t see why you can’t “tame” your toungue by just speaking English in certain settings. However, Anzaldua could make the argument that you may have cut off your language for a brief moment. The situation does become different when we talk about accents. Im not exactly sure how you would tame an accent, so I can agree, but I don’t know how cutting a language would help.

Hello, my name is Janiel. I am 18 and Dominican and live in the Heights. I’m very nervous about starting my college experience, especially since I am not sure on what I want to major on. As of right now my main focus is to get good grades in all my classes so I can maintain it when I do decide what to major in. Other than being nervous, I am also very excited to get to know new people. I would say I am very introverted and it is especially hard to get me loose around people who I am not used to, but I came into college telling myself I am going to try and meet new people.

My biggest hobby/interest is football. My interest in football was spiked because I loved the idea of wrestling and catching. As a kid I used to go up to all my cousins and we would wrestle. I also used to have an obsession with the WWE and I used to love John Cena. I got the catching from baseball because I found it to be challenging in a relaxing way. When I first found out about football I realized the aspects that I liked about both of these things were in football. 8 years later, I appreciate and will forever appreciate football for all the lessons I’ve learned from it. Even now, I still play flag football although I prefer tackle football. Some other notable hobbies of mine would be watching anime, and hanging out with friends.

This is a picture of me and my close friends at a park. This picture means a lot to me because it reminds me that I am blessed to have people around me and that I am not alone. I’m looking forward to meeting more people at Baruch.

In the passage “First Day” we are told a story of a 5 year old girl and her first day in school. The passage is written through the perspective of the girl and what I found interesting is the abundance of details. Through the many details given we are able to infer many things. For example, we were told that the girls mother spent a lot of time in the morning doing her hair, something that is atypical for the mother. Considering that her mother is going above and beyond, I assume the mother is nervous for her daughter’s first day.

Something else I noticed is how the girl has no idea of what she is getting into. Throughout the story, the mother seems to be panicky and worried about her daughter’s first day. On the other hand, the lack of her own emotions portrayed makes me believe she wasn’t too worried.

I find this relatable because when I was going into my first day of school I had no idea what I was there for. I was told I just played with toys in the corner and didn’t make much of a fuss.