Melting Pot as a Young

¶ … Melting Pot

As a young foreigner to America, the speaker of Julia Alvarez's poem, "Queens, 1963?,observes the freedom that America was to provide. The foreigners of the city are not truly "free," but are confined into a corner of the world that was a melting pot of society. A certain sense of freedom is felt yet the people of Queens are not truly accepted by mainstream Americans. Acceptance into this country, as well as their neighborhood was a slow feat that they managed to conquer. Instead of accepting their new neighbors, the people of Queens decide to turn the tables and discriminate as they had once been discriminated against.

Alvarez's poem is more of a narrative short story or brief essay than it is a poem. Nearly every line is a complete, well-constructed sentence, each one building on the previous sentence. However, she certainly manages to get her point across in this manner (describing to the reader what a typical community looked like). In addition to her almost essay-like poem, Alvarez uses a fairly high vocabulary that could be a challenge for a reader with a minimal understanding of vocabulary. For example, she uses words such as "cultivated" and "plummeting." These are not particularly difficult words but for a person with a limited education -- such as the immigrant population of Queens in 1963 -- the poem may be hard to comprehend. Even though her poem manipulates language in an unusual manner, however, there is a certain type of beauty in their expression just as he immigrants found in Queens. The lines that best exemplify this start at line 75, "One by one I imagined the houses sinking into their lawns, the grass grown wild and tall in the past tense of this continent." In these lines, Alvarez explains how lawns in the area grew so tall that they almost dwarfed the houses. She also makes the allusion of overgrown grass as comparable to the fields of old, before America was industrialized and filled with homes -- homes now filled by the "underclass" living in Queens. Alvarez's writing style in this poem is a bit dry compared to typical poetry, but she still gets her points across in a sufficient and artistic style.

The description of Queens in this poem is both depressing and uplifting at the same time, just as it was experienced by the people living in Queens at the time. There are many descriptions of injustices, both racial and economic in "Queens, 1963" which are sad to read and think of. One example is found in the lines, "Mr. Scott the retired plumber, and his plump midwestern wife, considered moving home back home where white and black got along and stayed where they belonged." The implications of this, though not surprising for the times, are still saddening to think of. Mr. Scott thought of moving back to a place where races were separated because that is where they got along with each other. This means that whites and blacks were not getting along with each other in Queens where there was no separation. Despite the amount of negativity surrounding Queens in the 1960's, there was an uplifting aspect to it all. A sense of community is always an extremely comforting thing and it seems as if Queens had this in its possession. As part of a melting pot, everyone has to stick together in order to standup against the oppression they face on a daily basis. Gestures of kindness were not always shown due to fear, but people were aware of others' good intentions. In line 57 Alvarez displays an example of the desire to be kind but the fear that overtakes that: "A dark man in a suit with a girl about my age walked quickly into a car. My hand lifted but fell before I made a welcoming gesture." Queens, New York circa 1960 does not sound like it was a particularly nice community, but it had some redeeming qualities of an understanding of quiet respect that reflects the manner in which the immigrants of Queens found s ort of community in their communal disadvantges.