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A Study Guide for Diana Garcia's "The Flat of the Land"
A Study Guide for Diana Garcia's "The Flat of the Land"
A Study Guide for Diana Garcia's "The Flat of the Land"
Ebook39 pages26 minutes

A Study Guide for Diana Garcia's "The Flat of the Land"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Diana Garcia's "The Flat of the Land," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories 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 Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 27, 2016
ISBN9781535836593
A Study Guide for Diana Garcia's "The Flat of the Land"

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    A Study Guide for Diana Garcia's "The Flat of the Land" - Gale

    13

    The Flat of the Land

    Diana García

    1993

    Introduction

    The Flat of the Land is a story by Diana García about what an isolated Mexican American woman experiences when the land around her house begins taking on a life of its own, in the form of spreading mud of mysterious origin. García, who was born and reared in a migrant labor camp in California, is best known as a poet whose debut collection, When Living Was a Labor Camp (2000), won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. García drew on autobiographical experiences for the poems of that collection, which pay tribute to the lives of her many family members who endured—and in some instances fell victim to—the tribulations of Mexican American farmworkers.

    Though García's experiences may have informed the perspective in The Flat of the Land, the story is above all a work of imagination in which the protagonist, Amparo, is a cryptic individual. The details of the story solidify Amparo's identity as Chicana, but her past remains a mystery, while for the present she has withdrawn from the broader cultural experience not only of Mexican Americans but of all Americans: she is living alone in a modern, adobe-walled model house in the midst of an abandoned development. As an interesting bubble of mud nearby spreads into a crevice, then a pond, then more, Amparo's solitary life becomes stranger and stranger. The Flat of the Land can be found in the collection Pieces of the Heart: New Chicano Fiction (1993), edited by Gary Soto.

    Author Biography

    Karen Diana García was born in 1950 in a migrant labor camp in the San Joaquin Valley, California, to parents Manuel and Tomasa García. The camp was owned by the California Packing Corporation. Although the camps and farms were notoriously hard on the migrant laborers employed in the region, the young García—who went by Diana (pronounced thee-ah-nah)—did not find the setting without its charms, as she told the Monterey Herald: As a child it was idyllic. There was a sense of constant companionships and a swirl of family and friends and culture in the camp. Everyone she knew, including her two brothers, spoke Spanish. They

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