'The Hammon and the Beans: Critical Analysis\r'

'Analyzing â€Å"The Hammon and the Beans” In â€Å"The Hammon and the Beans” author Americo Paredes writes about the problems of Mexican-American tiddlerren growing up in poverty. The story takes place around 1926 in a fictional south of Texas setting of Jonesville-on-the-Grande, under the shadows of arm Jones. This setting is reminiscent with Paredes home of Brownsville and historic strengthen Brown, established in 1846 to house troops during the Mexican-American state of war and later used to defend the border. The story features child characters that observe, notwithstanding do not fully visit the uneasiness of the adult world of south Texas.Our junior, unidentified narrator sets the tone by describing his home which is his granddaddy’s dirty, yellow, big-framed house. He also notes why his gravel hated it. â€Å"They had fleas, she said. ” He goes on to render how the people of Jonesville-on-the-Grande became in sync with the routine on the stakes at Fort Jones. â€Å"At eight, the whistle from the venture washables sent us children off to school. The consentient town stopped for lunch with the noon whistle, and subsequently lunch all(prenominal)body went back to work when the post laundry said it was one o’ clock. As the young male child recounts â€Å"border troubles” and why the s disusediers came back to old Fort Jones, he casually introduces Chonita. Chonita is one of his playmates as well as a family friend. Her mother did his family’s laundry for use of a one-room shack on a vacant plot of land be to his grand flummox. Chonita plays a rather large role in this young male child’s memory. He describes how afterwards the post’s flag went down every night, Chonita would walk to the soldier’s mess halls and gull through and through the screen as they stuffed themselves. She would stand thither until they were finished so that the cooks would grant her the leftover s.He had just go into the neighborhood when a boy invited him to hear Chonita make headway a speech. He saw she was a jagged girl with dirty feet. All of the children were looking on as she stood atop an alley fence. Everyone was shouting, â€Å" talk! Speech! Let Chonita make a speech! chide in English Chonita! ” She yelled out, â€Å" take hold me the hammon and the beans! move over me the hammon and the beans! ” Every evening Chonita would make her speech as the young boy waited until they could go play. One daytime the young boy fell ill and when he was cured Chonita was not around. As he grew through the 1930s he thought of her and the hammon and the beans often.Eventually, he versed that Chonita had passed away from an illness. The night of Chonita’s death, everyone was really sad, but the young boy just felt strange. The impact told the boy’s bewilder that Chonita’s father was in a rather joyous mood. The boy’s father told th e doctor that the man was not Chonita’s biological father and that her real father had been shot and hanged. The two men proceeded with a conference about radicalism, and came to no significant conclusion. The young boy headed off to bed at his mother’s request. As he lay there not fully asleep, he thought about Mexican hero Emiliano Zapata.He heard the bugle blare at the post and thought of Chonita in heaven shouting, â€Å"Give me the hammon and the beans! ” He began to cry, and not knowing why he was crying he felt better. Using â€Å"The Hammon and the Beans” Americo Paredes expound the Brownsville of his youth. Paredes wrote with a darkly tragic irony of a young boy’s first consider with death. I believe Chonita was a symbolization. A symbol of how Mexican-Americans struggled against poverty, prejudice, and loss of cultural identity. Work Cited Paredes, Ame? rico. The Hammon and the Beans. Houston, TX: Arte Publico, University of Houston, 1994. Print.\r\n'