Week 9: UFW

Because I took Professor Knapp’s English 1A class last semester, I am very familiar with the United Farm Workers and the movements that they inspired. Our final term paper in English 1A was a research paper where we had to research a topic related with farm workers and/or the fight for equality in general. I chose to research and write about Dolores Huerta, the influential activist who worked alongside the likes Cesar Chavez and Robert F. Kennedy in the fight for equality not only for farm workers, but for anyone who has been subjected to the horrors of inequality. Generally speaking, I learned about the Bracero Program, the strikes, and the resulting rights that came with being able to collectively bargain with the employers. The bracero program was an agreement between the United States and Mexico that was negotiated by President Franklin Roosevelt (U.S.) and President Manuel Camacho (Mexico) during World War II. It basically imported temporary Mexican laborers to harvest crops because there was a shortage of people to do these tasks. The Bracero Program was supposed to end after the war, but it was made into Public Law 78 in 1951. Led by the efforts of Cesar Chavez, the farm workers were able to end the Bracero Program in 1964 through Congressional legislation. The fight was long from being over however. They had to fight for better treatment of farm workers. They had to fight for better wages. The official website of the UFW provided a statistic that said in the mid 1960s, the average wage of a farm worker was $0.90 per hour, plus $0.10 for every filled basket. Not only that, they had to pay around $2.00 a day to stay in a filthy, mosquito infested shack that had plumbing or cooking capabilities. These were truly inhumane conditions that sorely needed to change. The Delano Grape Strike helped in getting legislation passed for farm workers rights. It started when grape pickers demanded a pay increase to $1.25 an hour, resulting in the growers denying their request and bringing in scab workers. Previously, growers were able to quell strikes by eventually agreeing to slight wage increase. They finally relented and raised wages. However, to the shocked horror of the growers, the strikers became even more inspired! The strikers demanded the right to unionize. Cesar Chavez asked the public to refrain from buying grapes that did not have a union label. Because this was happening during the height of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the strikers benefited from a heightened awareness from the public of the negative effects of racism and discrimination. As a result, Cesar Chavez’s plea to not purchase grapes without a union label was extremely successful as millions of people stopped buying certain grapes.

This picture is of a group of protesting a bill in Wisconsin that eliminated collective bargaining rights from nearly all public employees. 60 years after Cesar Chavez struggled to get the right to collectively bargain fair working conditions for one group of workers, a conservative state government is trying to eliminate that progress. I chose this because it best represents the continuing struggle in the volatile 21st century.

Week 7: Feedback

Erika Hernandez, Ilse Munoz, and David Bethune were extremely kind enough to peer review my rough draft of the Persepolis formal paper. They provided me with many wise, constructive suggestions that would really benefit my final draft. They recognized that I was lacking a strong thesis statement, so I knew to really focus on that when writing my final draft. They also noticed that I did not include any type of personal experience in my paper. They suggested that if I incorporated my own personal experience, it would make my paper more strong and more rich. They also suggested that it would really strengthen my thesis statement and would really draw the reader in. Ilse especially suggested that I reread my Historical Narrative formal paper from English 1A because she said that she really enjoyed it and that if I was able to write like that, I would be in great position. The one thing they all really like about my rough draft was that I was able to incorporated strong quotes that really gave my paper a sense of direction. They suggested I enhance that sense of direction and improve the overall flow because they felt my paper has great potential.

Persepolis Paper Rough Draft

Jaspal Dosanjh
Professor Knapp
Rough Draft #1
Due Date: 21 October 2011

Marjane is a young girl who lives in Iran. She has a very unique perspective that develops as the graphic novel progresses. She lived in Iran prior to the Islamic Revolution during the reign Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, simply known as the Shah. She lived in Iran during the Islamic Revolution when the Shah was sent into exile. And she lived in Iran in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution. The progression of her perspective as she gets older can be broken down into those three events.
Prior to the Islamic Revolution, Iran was a lot more secular. Schools were also secular. Female students were not required to wear the hijab. Male and female students were allowed to study together. And the schools were not religious. The school that Marjane went to was a French school. During this time of pre-religious upheaval, Marjane saw herself as very religious; “[she] was born with it” (6). She was so religious at this time that she saw herself as the last prophet. She originally wanted to become a prophet her family’s maid, and good friend Mehri, ate separately from the rest of the family, her father owned a Cadillac when many other people could not afford one, and because her grandmother was always in constant pain. Marjane also has her own holy book (which only her grandmother knows about). She also had many conversations with God in the middle of the night. I found this to be extremely interesting because of her relatively young age; she is only six years old. “[She] wanted to be Justice, Love, and the Wrath of God all in one” (9). It is very astonishing that she had that type of devotion to any cause, let alone religion, at that young age. It is also astonishing that she has such a deep understanding of God and her place in the religion in general.
During the Islamic Revolution, Marjane starts to progress away from her religious side and more to her revolutionary side. She states “the year of the Revolution I had to take action. So I put my prophetic destiny aside for a while” (10). She felt the need to act, yet she was still very young. Again, I find it extremely astonishing that she has such a sense of responsibility and also such a vast comprehension of the enormity of the moment in which she is living. It is around this time that her conversations with God were fewer and fewer. She starts reading more about different revolutionaries throughout history such as Karl Marx and Descartes, Fidel Castro and the children of Palestine, the Vietnamese killed by the Americans and the different revolutionaries of her own country. Her last conversation with God, He asks her why she does not want to be a prophet anymore to which she says that she does not want to talk about that. She then overhears her parents talking about an incident where the police locked some patrons inside of a movie theater and burned it to the ground. Her parents discuss their desire to go to the demonstration the following day. After begging her parents to let her go to the demonstration, she finally begrudgingly accepts her parent’s decision not to let her demonstrate. But when she asks for God that night, he does not come.
Finally, after the Islamic Revolution is successful, she fully progresses into her revolutionary ways leaving her religious self behind. She becomes more and more rebellious. She rebels against her school. She rebels against her parents. She rebels against the suppressive nature of the new theocracy. She does not like to wear the veil. She argues with her teachers. She wears jeans. She does not accept the fact that Mehri is not seen as her equal. She does not accept the fact that there is a social class system. She does not understand why Mehri and her love cannot be together. She does not accept the fact that her father observes and lives by the class system. She does not accept the fact that she is restricted in what she can or cannot listen to or wear in public.

Week Five Journal: Pre-Writing

The blog that I expanded into my first formal paper was the character analysis of Marjane. I really wanted to expand this post into a full paper because, being the main character and all, she has many deep facets to her. I also wanted to quickly point out that I really feel like she is very idealized as well. There is not much wrong that she really does, which is a bit peculiar to me. The thing I really focused on about Marjane was her evolution into a sort of rebel. She evolves from what she thought was a prophet into a revolutionary then she finally finds her niche as rebel in her own way. I felt like I could really see and feel her progression. She was really into God in her early years. At one point, she talked to God almost every night without fail. She comes up with her own tenets (which only her grandmother knows about). After she hears of the theater that is set on fire by national forces and the subsequent protest that was scheduled in response to it, she feels a great urge to go with her parents to protest such horrible injustices. Towards the end of the novel, she rebels in her own ways. She starts smoking (she’s rebelling against her parents, but she is really rebelling against her childhood), she ditches school, she talks back to her teachers, she listens to banned music, and she wears “inappropriate”clothing. It gets to the point where her parents are so worried about her safety that they send her to live in Vienna, Austria. She is only fourteen at the time. Because of this graphic novel, I was able to think and reflect on my own progression and evolution as a an individual. To kind of reflect on who I was to who I have become to who I will be tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and beyond in relation to who I hope I can become. It is sometimes mind boggling taking the time out and looking back. Because we change every single day, we a lot of times fail to see that change on a “macro” level (us as a whole) and sometimes focus too much on the “micro” level (very specific characteristics). It is important to consistently reflect on your life so you can recognize patterns in your evolution and so you can see how your beliefs have developed over time. The reason this is so critical in life is because when you are able to recognize those patterns, you can change and/or break the patterns that you don’t like. You have the awareness to better adapt into who you wish to be. The importance of seeing how your beliefs have developed cannot be understated. Your beliefs today are in direct correlation to the beliefs you developed from the moment you were born.