Western society today is based on an amalgamation of many different cultures, societies, backgrounds, and ethnicities that make up a good portion of who we are, especially so in America of all places. So it comes as no surprise that eventually, differences are going to be present to a significant degree within the country and society as a whole, with a heavy amount of background focused on both so called 'white culture' and those who are seen as 'minorities'. However, it is enviable for the two different sides of western to society to collide, and the basis of America is in fact people living in the country who take pride in it - or so we as a culture like to believe. In reality, there are far more people discontent with racial barriers, a thing that seemingly vanished a long time ago in the view of modern day America. Two poets who come from ethnically diverse backgrounds, share very different views on what makes their ethnicity truly 'their own'. One author is Aurora Levins Morales, who wrote the poem "Child of the Americas", a poem in which she speaks about being a product of a very varied cultural background and how it affected her childhood. The other author is Gloria Anzuldua, a lesbian woman with a large amount of Latina heritage who wrote "To Live In The Borderlands Means You", a story about living in the area known as the Borderlands, and how it effects those living there daily. While Aurora Levins Morales represents her varied heritage as a source of wholeness that completed her, Gloria Anzuldua expresses her ethnic identity as a source of conflict and division among the different aspects of her own heritage. Not only that, but the differences in tone are even very apparent with the language the two use in their respective poems. Morales speaks using first person pronouns, while Anzuldua speaks using second person pronouns - both of which make sense given the appropriate knowledge of each.
To start things off, we have to briefly look at the similarities between the two. As mentioned earlier, both poets come from similar backgrounds of ethnicity; Morales has a wild variety of background cultures within her, including Carribean, Pureto Rican, African and European to name just a few. Anzuldua has a good amount of Latina in her, which includes Mexican, as well as being white. Both women's environments also helped shape themselves to be who they are and affected each poet's poem in their own unique way. They both speak of a crossroads To make it clear, neither women are ashamed of their cultural heritage - far from it, to the two authors, it helps define who they are to the rest of the world, essentially. Both however talk about a "crossroads" that help reinforce that definition of who they choose to portray themselves to the rest of the world. Morales uses it as such, "I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish./I was born at the crossroads/and I am whole." (18-20) Looking at this, one can see that she considers herself to be not of any established conception of what a person is, but rather a new breed of the future, as history defines it. The crossroads seems to be a open meeting ground in which different cultures meet and seem to exchange cultures. Anzuldua also makes
