We Heard It When We Were Young
Download We Heard It When We Were Young PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get We Heard It When We Were Young book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
We Heard It When We Were Young
Author: Chuy Renteria
language: en
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Release Date: 2021-11
We Heard It When We Were Young tells the story of a young boy, first-generation Mexican American, who is torn between cultures: between immigrant parents trying to acclimate to midwestern life and a town that is, by turns, supportive and disturbingly antagonistic.
We Heard It When We Were Young
Author: Chuy Renteria
language: en
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Release Date: 2021-11-01
Most agree that West Liberty is a special place. The first majority Hispanic town in Iowa, it has been covered by media giants such as Reuters, Telemundo, NBC, and ESPN. But Chuy Renteria and his friends grew up in the space between these news stories, where a more complicated West Liberty awaits. We Heard It When We Were Young tells the story of a young boy, first-generation Mexican American, who is torn between cultures: between immigrant parents trying to acclimate to midwestern life and a town that is, by turns, supportive and disturbingly antagonistic. Renteria looks past the public celebrations of diversity to dive into the private tensions of a community reflecting the changing American landscape. There are culture clashes, breakdancing battles, fistfights, quinceañeras, vandalism, adventures on bicycles, and souped-up lowriders, all set to an early 2000s soundtrack. Renteria and his friends struggle to find their identities and reckon with intergenerational trauma and racism in a town trying to do the same. A humorous and poignant reflection on coming of age, We Heard It When We Were Young puts its finger on a particular cultural moment at the turn of the millennium.
When We Were Young in Africa
Imagine you are watching a movie and suddenly the action stops and the credits begin to roll. Leaving Africa was like that. I had been going along in my African story, full of its sights and sounds and smells'children balancing kerosene tins on their heads, drums rumbling at night, air scented by smoke from charcoal and wood fires. . . And then: Cut. It was over. After twelve years of growing up mostly in West Africa, I was back in the United States, where people thought growing up in Africa was strange and growing up the daughter of missionaries was even stranger. I learned to avoid mentioning that part of my life at all, because if I did, I would feel the stereotypes close round me. I did my best to pass as American without ever quite succeeding. When my mother asked me in her last days, ?Do you appreciate your African childhood? I replied with cruel honesty, ?Yes, but now I don't belong in America.' Just weeks after her death at the age of 96, I sat myself down in a state of survivor's freedom to explore the childhood I had tried to put behind me. I poured out memories across a yellow notepad and began reading the letters Mother had passed on to me'intimate letters she and Daddy had written back to family from Africa, letters I myself had written from my boarding school in Nigeria my last three years there. As a historian I already understood the richness of life told in letters: the way secrets spring from their pages. Thus innocently (if any historian can be said to be innocent) I began'and found myself tangled up in a story I had not just forgotten but had never known.