Grissel G. Estrada

Professor Warner

English 112B

12/06/06

Annotated Bibliography: Overcoming Barriers

I decided to focus on the theme of overcoming barriers for the annotated bibliography non-fiction. Though I did not do it intentionally, most of these sources come from the point of view or the struggle of women. The focus of this theme was because I thought a lot of students confront many barriers that sometimes stop them from doing what they want.

Most of these struggles that are seen in the sources that I chose have to do with social issues. I believe that students should get the real stories out of their history classes instead of �sugar coding� it. Also, I believe it is important to know what is going around the world to be more informed about different cultures and their different struggles. It is interesting to know this because once we find out their struggles, even though they are across the ocean, they are similar to what we are going through.

Most of these sources are from a collective point of view. They have many different voices to the point they are trying to make, yet all these voices take the same stand. For example, Marina Budhos�s Remix or Ann Bausum�s With Courage and Cloth, they have different people that contributed in making their books, but they have a similar concept. The other books used for the annotated bibliography come from an individual perspective, which is also important because as individuals, we go through our own problems that do not necessarily have to do with social issues.

Bausum, Ann. With Courage and Cloth: Winning the Fight for a Woman�s Right to Vote.

Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2004.

Ann Bausum explains with illustrations of women who initiated women�s right to vote. Bausum focuses on one woman in particular, Alice Paul, who made a big difference to many other women supporting this cause. The book also introduces a section where it notes the initiation of the right to vote for women from 1848-1906. Bausum also acknowledges other woman, such as Sojourner Truth, that made an impact to the suffrage. The time of events is from 1913 with a parade on the Inauguration of President Wilson to 1920 when the 19^th Amendment was established.

The significance of this book is to remind young readers that women did have a struggle in America. As my theme indicates, women overcame the barriers by protesting for their rights. It is important to acknowledge this struggle because most history text books overlook this part of history.

Budhos, Marina. Remix: Conversations With Immigrant Teenagers. New York, N. Y.:

Henry Holt & Company, 1999.

Just as the title indicates, this book has the many voices of teenage immigrants. Most of what these teenagers say is very universal. They worry about their families; they want to make friends; they struggle with the language; they try to fit in; they struggle with their identities. The teenagers in this book show how much they go through in order to obtain the �American Dream.� This book is very much like First Crossing, only the stories in Remix come from real students.

A lot of students that come from every corner of the world can identify with the struggles of the students identified in this book. These young adults are overcoming great barriers in a new country.

Dog, Mary Crow. Lakota Woman. New York, N. Y.: Grove Weidendeld, 1990.

Mary Brave Bird is abused at age 15 and drinks heavily. She experiences the violent deaths of friends from early age. She gets involved in the American Indian Movement that was created in the late 60s and 70s. �The movement for Indian rights is first of all spiritual, with the ancient religion at the heart of it� (Taken from Lakota Woman).

The significance of this book is for the knowledge the readers may obtain about contemporary Native Americans. There is not a lot of information out there that can relate to American Indian Movement. It would be a good source to take the similarities and differences of this movement to the Civil Rights Movement and the Chicano Movement, which all happened during the 60s and 70s.

Gruenewald, Mary Matsuda. Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in

Japanese American Internment Camps. Troutdale, Or. : NewSage Press, 2005.

�In 1941, Mary Matsuda Gruenewald was a teenage girl who, like other Americans, reacted with horror to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Yet soon she and her family were among 110,000 innocent people imprisoned by the U.S. government because of their Japanese ancestry. In this eloquent memoir, she describes both the day-to-day and the dramatic turning points of this profound injustice: what is was like to face an indefinite sentence in crowded, primitive camps; the struggle for survival and dignity; and the strength gained from learning what she was capable of and could do to sustain her family. It is at once a coming-of-age story with interest for young readers, an engaging narrative on a topic still not widely known, and a timely warning for the present era of terrorism� (Taken from Amazon.com).

This part of history is not touched much by history text books. The perspective of a young adult may give more significance to this part of history. Though they are Americans, they are treated worse than second class citizens. As part of my theme, this book is breaking barriers by the telling of the story. The Japanese Americans should not keep their past quiet because it is important for the rest of to know what really happened.

Kuhn, Betsy. Angels of Mercy: The Army Nurses of World War II. New York, N. Y.:

Simon & Schuster, 1999.

�The Army nurses of World War II served in the United States and abroad, in dense jungles, war-torn villages, and on barren ice fields. Many encountered hardships: bombings, crude living conditions, inadequate food. They also experienced the frustration of receiving lesser pay and privileges than their male counterparts as they worked, sometimes around the clock, to treat the wounded while confronting air raids, the threat of invasion, and capture by the enemy� (Taken from Angels of Mercy).

The significance of this book is to remind young readers that there were women involved in the war. These women made a lot of difference in this war because they were helping out the soldiers get back to health. It is part of overcoming barriers because women were accepted to participate in a male-dominated field.

Latifa. My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban: A Young Woman�s Story.

New York, NY: Hyperion, 2001

�Latifa�s life was turned upside down the moment the Taliban took Kabul. The oppressive regime banned women from working, from schools, from public life, even from leaving their homes without a male relative. Female faces were outlawed as the burka, or head-to-toe veil, became mandatory. Frustrated by the sight of children wandering the streets below, and despite the danger to her own life, Latifa established a school and attempted to defy a regime, one child at a time� (Taken from My Forbidden Face).

The significance of this book is to inform the readers what is happening across the world. By taking the perspective of a woman that experiences this event it makes it more significant because readers learn that there are still a lot of unfair treatments to women.

Levine, Ellen. Freedom�s Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories.

New York, N. Y.: Puffin Books, 1993.

Levine takes the experiences of young people and teenagers who lived through the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. The accounts of the people in the book tell their stories of how they were involved with segregation, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Children�s Crusades, and other protests.

The importance of this book is to identify the voices of young people during this time. What most of us hear are the activists� voices that are not young. There could be more connection between the young readers to the experiences of the young people who participated in creating this book.

Pelzer, David J. A Child Called �It�. Deerfield Beach, Fla.: Health Communications,

1995.

�This book is a brief, horrifying account of the bizarre tortures she (Pelzer�s mother) inflicted on him, told from the point of view of the author as a young boy being starved, stabbed, smashed face-first into mirrors, forced to eat the contents of his sibling's diapers and a spoonful of ammonia, and burned over a gas stove by a maniacal, alcoholic mom. Sometimes she claimed he had violated some rule--no walking on the grass at school!--but mostly it was pure sadism. Inexplicably, his father didn't protect him; only an alert schoolteacher saved David�

(Taken from Amazon.com).

The overall significance of this story is that young readers may find similarities of their lives to the one lived by Pelzer. The author overcomes a great barrier which is the maltreatment of his mother. It may give hope to the readers that may be going through something similar.

Shakoor, Jordana Y. Civil Rights Childhood. Mississippi: University Press of

Mississippi, 1999.

�Two voices blend in this poignant memoir from Civil Rights era in Mississippi�a father�s and a daughter�s. The voices in this book tell a story whose theme is familiar to legions of African Americans. Yet its particular voices, until now, have gone unheard. Though this is told by a child born in the segregated South, it is also a story of a family�s triumph over a dark heritage, a story of a childhood that casts away a centuries-old tradition of insult and denial to embrace a heritage of freedom and love� (Taken from Civil Rights Childhood).

Here is another story that contributes to the suffering of African Americans. What makes this different, though, is the two different voices that the author decides to put.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. �Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions.� Critical Thinking

Reading and Writing. Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Bedau. 5^th ed. Boston, N.Y.: Bedford/St. Martin�s, 2005. 542-546.

Stanton uses the same ideas of the Declaration of Independence to bring awareness to the public that women are not treated as equal to men. The essay points specifically to how men make women inferior to them.

This essay is important because it projects a good parallel to that of the Declaration of Independence. It would be a good source to go along with the book written by Ann Bausum.

Walkout. Dir. Edward James Olmos. Perf. Alexa Vega, Michael Pe�a, Yancey Arias, and

Efren Ramirez. HBO Films, 2006.

Mexican American students struggle to get through their education in the East L.A. schools while they encounter various injustices during the late 1960s. Paula Crisostomo (Alexa Vega) first takes notice of the injustice when the principal of her school does not let the students use the bathroom during lunch time. The students are not allowed to speak Spanish in schools and not encouraged to apply to colleges. Based on the true accounts of the Chicano Movement for better education in the 1960s, this film captures the obstacles students face while demanding to be heard to teachers, police authority, and parents that stand in the way.

This is significant because just as there is little information of the Native American Movement, there is also little information of this movement. What teachers tend to teach more of the Civil Rights Movement is that of the African American community. This movie would be a good way to bring out similarities between these two movements taken in the same time.