This study will discuss how Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi and Charley Trujillo's Soldados: Chicanos in Viet Nam affect our understanding of the 1950s and the Vietnam War, respectively. Both books are non-fictional coming-of-age narratives and both involve an awakening of the authors to the lies of the American Dream. Moody experiences the reality of racism in the United States in the 1950s, which were seen by whites as the years of the full realization of that Dream. Trujillo's accounts show the racism of the United States military, which was held up as an example of a fully integrated institution representing the equality symbolized by that Dream.
The latter part of Moody's autobiographical work carries her into the 1960s and the flowering of the civil rights movement, but the part of the book which deals with the 1950s highlights the oppression which blacks experienced at a time when whites were enjoying the juiciest fruits of the American Dream. The book is most useful in illuminating the dark underbelly of the American Dream in the 1950s.
The first words of Moody's book give the reader the sense of the deep scars which have been inflicted on her by racism: "I'm still haunted by dreams of the time we lived on Mr. Carter's plantation" (11). Moody's childhood in the 1950s gives no sign of the guarded optimism which will come in the 1960s. The hunger and poverty of her and her family are exacerbated by the violence which grows from suffering and frustration. Moody is physically abused by her young uncle who cares for her and her sister (Moody 12, 16). Such abusive violence is a by-product of racist conditions which create poverty and misery.
Moody makes clear that racism is rampant not only in the South but in the rest of the nation as well, as this letter from her mother's boy friend testifies:
Los Angeles is a big city. But jobs are as hard to get out here as they are in Mississippi. And Negroes don't li...