Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    A Study Guide for Lorna Dee Cervantes's "Refugee Ship"
    A Study Guide for Lorna Dee Cervantes's "Refugee Ship"
    A Study Guide for Lorna Dee Cervantes's "Refugee Ship"
    Ebook32 pages20 minutes

    A Study Guide for Lorna Dee Cervantes's "Refugee Ship"

    By Gale and Cengage

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Lorna Dee Cervantes's "Refugee Ship", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Studentsfor all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMar 22, 2018
    ISBN9781535845946
    A Study Guide for Lorna Dee Cervantes's "Refugee Ship"

    Read more from Gale

    Related to A Study Guide for Lorna Dee Cervantes's "Refugee Ship"

    Related ebooks

    Teaching Methods & Materials For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Redux: A Poem Is a Suitcase

      Apr 10, 2018

      Redux: A Poem Is a Suitcase
      1 min read

    • Article

      Every Fucking Thing Was Hard

      May 28, 2020

      Every Fucking Thing Was Hard
      7 min read

    • Article

      Literary MagNet

      Oct 13, 2021

      “What words were turning inside her, as she cooked, waited for us to come home from work, from school, as she ate, slept?” asks a character about her grandmother in Ye Chun’s story “To Say.” Versions of this question thread throughout Ye’s story coll

      3 min read

    • Article

      Tracing Literary Lineage

      Oct 15, 2021

      first corresponded in 2016, after an essay by Shah appeared in Brevity’s special issue on race, racism, and racialization. Boyd, then coeditor of the Crux series in literary nonfiction at the University of Georgia Press, wrote to ask if Shah had a ma

      18 min read

    • Article

      Deconstructing Myths And Male Influence In ‘Fruit Of The Drunken Tree’

      Jul 31, 2018

      When I was a child growing up in Guatemala during the Civil War, my mom took me to play at my friend’s house late one night. She told me not to ask any questions. “Just play,” she said. While our mothers sat downstairs talking in hushed voices, my fr

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Sound of Wood and Steel

      Mar 1, 2023

      The Sound of Wood and Steel
      10 min read

    • Article

      Reenvisioning theWriters Group

      Feb 16, 2022

      IF YOU’RE like me, the only thing more difficult than struggling to revise a draft that’s stalled is struggling to revise someone else’s draft that’s stalled. Let’s face it: Reading other people’s writing for the sole purpose of giving them feedback

      7 min read

    • Article

      Fighting to Write Between Two Languages

      Apr 4, 2018

      1. Growing up, I developed my Spanish as a form of discipline. Spanish belonged at home, and English belonged at school. Only when my sister and I spoke did our bilingual conversation find itself walking in trepidation across the bridge we had built

      7 min read

    • Article

      Angles of Experience

      Feb 13, 2019

      Angles of Experience
      11 min read

    • Article

      Identity Crisis

      Oct 9, 2022

      Identity Crisis
      2 min read

    • Article

      I Have Never Felt That I Have Roots: The Millions Interviews Isabel Allende

      Jul 8, 2019

      I didn’t plan to write about refugees, but the conversations are all around us, and it just seeps into my books. In this one, it is the central theme. The post I Have Never Felt That I Have Roots: The Millions Interviews Isabel Allende appeared first

      5 min read

    • Article

      Can a Myth Grow Up?: The Poet Frank Stanford at Second Sight

      Apr 18, 2019

      The real question about the cult-hero of American poetry has now become: “What are we gonna do with this motherfucker?” The post Can a Myth Grow Up?: The Poet Frank Stanford at Second Sight appeared first on The Millions.

      15 min read

    • Article

      Javier Zamora: ‘Now The Chances Of Me Crossing The Border And Surviving Would Be Slim’

      Sep 10, 2022

      Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador in 1990. Both his parents emigrated to the US before he turned five. At the age of just nine, Zamora undertook a treacherous journey by land and sea to join them in California – events recalled in his debut poetr

      4 min read

    • Article

      Writing Political Poetry In Difficult Times: There’s A Reason Fascist Regimes Come For The Artists | Maxine Beneba Clarke

      Nov 8, 2021

      Some authors write for escape. I wrote poetry during the pandemic to process, to meditate on the world that was, to try and make some sense of things as a writer, and hopefully to offer some peace to at least one reader, somewhere, somehow. When Covi

      3 min read

    • Article

      City of God

      Nov 21, 2022

      City of God
      8 min read

    • Article

      Paddling Through History

      Jun 15, 2023

      Paddling to DeCourcy Island is at the top of my summer activities wish list. The Southern Gulf Island region is steeped in thousands of years of culture and history for the Snuneymuxw, Stz’uminus, Lyackson, Halalt, and Penelakut First Nations. DeCour

      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for A Study Guide for Lorna Dee Cervantes's "Refugee Ship"

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Lorna Dee Cervantes's "Refugee Ship" - Gale

      18

      Refugee Ship

      Lorna Dee Cervantes

      1974

      Introduction

      Lorna Dee Cervantes's Refugee Ship launched her career as a major American poet after it was published in 1974, in the Mexico City newspaper El Heraldo. The poem was included in Cervantes's Emplumada (1981), which went on to win the 1982 American Book Award. The poem explores the speaker's search for an identity as a Chicana adrift without language to guide her. Orphaned by her mother from the Spanish language, the speaker looks Chicana in the mirror but stumbles over the words that are her birthright. She is a refugee without a home, without a language of her own, without a safe harbor, and without an identity. Appearing at a time when few Chicana poets were published and even fewer taught in classrooms, Refugee Ship inspired generations of Chicana writers to make their voices heard.

      Author Biography

      Cervantes was born in San Francisco's Mission District on August 6, 1954. Growing up as a mixed Mexican and Native American, Cervantes was discouraged from learning Spanish by her mother, who hoped to shield her daughter from racism. Cervantes moved to San Jose at the age of five to live with her mother, brother, and grandmother following her parents' divorce. The barrio where she grew up was overrun with gang violence and crippling poverty. Raised primarily by her grandmother, Cervantes taught her grandmother to read and write by reviewing her school lessons from kindergarten through her graduation from high school. Her grandmother, a native Californian and survivor of the genocide of the Chumash tribe, had been sold into slavery as a girl and was never taught to read. Cervantes graduated from high school in 1972 and

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1