Week 5 Question 11

In Pat Mora's "Legal Alien," she mentions about her nationality and how she is treated. She is very discrete and hides her pain in her words. Her parents must have been Mexican, and she was either born in America or Mexico, but is an American Citizen. She doesn't feel like she fits in to neither worlds as she mentions in her poem, "..American but hyphenated, viewed by Anglos as perhaps exotic, perhaps inferior, definitely different, viewed by Mexicans as alien." I that quote she knows that by either culture she will always be viewed differently, and she doesn't feel like she belongs. I do thing she used a correct term in titling her work. the word "alien" means, a resident born in or belonging to another country who has not acquired citizenship by naturalization, a foreigner, a person who has been estranged or excluded. She feels like a foreigner and they see her a one too.