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Famous All Over Town (Danny Santiago)

In the novel Famous All Over Town, Danny Santiago writes about the barrio in East Los Angeles, a whole world away from the experience of most of the residents of the city. The author details the life of this subculture, how it has developed as a reflection of the culture of Mexico and how the original culture is challenged and altered in the American context. The life of the barrio is presented here as difficult and even dangerous, producing generation after generation of angry and defiant youth who strike back at all of society for the world into which they have been born. One of the themes in this novel related to the production of these angry young people is parenting and the way young people come to see their parents in a new light as they (the children) grow up and measure their reality against the ideal they have been taught and against the image projected by the larger white society in which they find themselves, an image that is itself distorted and false.

Chato Medina, the protagonist of this novel, has reached a crossroads and must decide what to do with his life. In order to make that decision, he thinks back through his memories of the past: "Maybe if I relived my yesterdays I could be surer of my tomorrows" (8). In reliving those yesterdays, he also relives his sense of his parents and how that sense changed. The sorts of changes noted for Chato are not unique to his situation. Every child begins as he begins--parents are simply accepted as a given, a part of the landscape that was always there and that the young child believe will always be there. There are certainly tensions between parents and children no matter what the age, but the younger child accepts the parents more readily, looks up to them as role models more easily, and ignores their foibles (if he or she even notices them) more readily. Chato sits with his father and his father's friends every week and is proud to do so, for this is a ritual tha...

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Famous All Over Town (Danny Santiago). (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 02:07, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689980.html