Summary and reader response of “Como Tú/Like You/Like me”
This poem was written by Richard Blanco, and based off of the title of the poem I can tell the author was trying to target the bilingual speakers, by the subtitle I that truly understand who the target audience of the poem is : D.A.C.A Dreamers and immigrants. The structure of a poem is different from what I’ve personally seen before, the poem starts off with a quote translated from English to Spanish, and then has two really long stanzas afterwards. I think that the author of the poem chose to start off with a quote in order to catch the reader’s attention along with the title being written in three different ways.
The author definitely uses metaphors, he writes “…I gaze into my palm a wrinkled map I still can’t read/my lifeline an unnamed road I can’t find, can’t/trace back to the fork my parents’ trek/ that cradled me here”(Blanco lines 8-11) This is a sentence that has many examples of metaphors, similes, and these metaphors and similes create a sense of unusual imagery. In the sense that I’ve never heard this sense of imagery, “I gaze into my palm a wrinkled map” His palm doesn’t have a wrinkled map in it, which is a metaphor for his background but also lets the reader imagine a wrinkled map.
The author is addressing D.A.C.A Dreamers and all immigrants, being that the poem says “como tu” repeatedly makes me believe that the author can relate to what he is saying in his own poem. With that being said, I believe that the author must either be an immigrant or a D.A.C.A Dreamer. The author is trying to share his story, a story that he believes every immigrant or dreamer can relate to, I don’t think the author is trying to inform because the language used is language only possibly a person who can relate to the experience can truly understand.
The title is repeated throughout the whole poem. It is used to prove that the author is like you, the reader, who can relate to these experiences, it gives the reader a sense of comfort. From the title before reading, I thought the poem I thought the author was going to speak about everyone being alike regardless of what language one speaks, but after I read the poem I realized what the comparison was, it was for immigrants and him.
Overall, I think this poem is explaining the struggles and experiences being an immigrant. For example, “…I woke up to this dream country I didn’t choose, that/didn’t choose me trapped in a nightmare/ of its hateful glares”(Blanco lines.11-14 ). Children of immigrants didn’t choose to come here and neither did the country they are in now but being here they get many hateful glares by those who view immigrants differently. Since most immigrants come to this country when they’re young they don’t recall much of their home country, “…I’m also from the lakes and farms, waterfalls and prairies of another country I can’t fully claim either”(Blanco lines. 14-16).
My immediate response to the poem was to think about the struggles that I was saved from by being born in this country, and it also makes me feel bad for all of those people who have gone through and experienced experiences as the ones portrayed in the poem. This poem made me feel guilt for the way immigrants are being treated, and made me wonder if maybe some people treated my mom this way or these thoughts went through her head at some point . I don’t think the author was looking for pity while writing the poem, I truly just believe that he just wanted to share his story because he knows that many people can relate to it.
This poem didn’t trigger me personally, but being a first generation American it truly made me wonder if my parents who came here young felt this way, and felt like they had to be Americanized to be accepted; if they felt lost coming to this country. The poem truly made me feel like I could relate to the experience because it was described so well. The poem made me think about all immigrants ever in any country and it made me wonder how many of them can relate to Richard Blanco.
The text agrees with my idea that I already had on immigration, in fact it made it clearer. I didn’t know that people tend to lose themselves while being an immigrant in not the most inviting country. I personally knew it was difficult but I didn’t know it was that difficult and that it could cause emotional damage to a person, which is how this poem made that experience clearer to me.
The author’s structural decisions are still interesting to me and they will definitely stand out to me, like the epigraph and I will consider it with every poem that I read.This poem left me with an empty feeling, not like that empty feeling you get after you read something meaningless. But it left me with a feeling of emptiness and sadness, I truly felt for people who could relate to this it made me feel pain for them.
I would definitely recommend this poem to others, so that they can see and realize how hard things actually are. I’d share this with those who can relate so they can see that they are not the only ones who feel this way. The more people who know about the situation, maybe the closer a change could be, if people actually realized how these people feel.
