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Author: Jimmy Santiago Baca
Publisher: Arte Publico Press
ISBN: 1518506399
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
“There’s no way you can do this reentry thing,” Orlando Lucero tells himself after getting out of prison. He has spent most of his life institutionalized, first in an orphanage and then in the Denver Youth Authority for smuggling weed. Orlando knows nothing about freedom. What does one do with it? What is it? His brother promised to teach him the carpentry trade, but Orlando quickly discovers Camilo is—like their parents—an addict, robbing and stealing to feed his habit. So he turns to Lila, his prison pen pal who encouraged both his poetry writing and sexual fantasies. Soon he moves in with her and engages in the acts he dreamed about while incarcerated, but living the straight life seems impossible. “Freedom is full of hazards, lots of sharp edges, and they cut me at every turn.” As he is sucked back into a life of crime, he can’t help but think going back to prison would be a relief. Renowned poet Jimmy Santiago Baca explores in lyrical prose one young man’s attempts to break free from the cycle of addiction, violence and abuse that contributed to his imprisonment and impede his search for happiness and a productive life. In a society that considers him a criminal because of his brown skin, and where those in authority—including a parade of priests when he was just a boy—take advantage of him, Orlando must learn to believe in himself against all the odds, in spite of the institutionalized racism he has endured since boyhood.
Author: Jimmy Santiago Baca
Publisher: Arte Publico Press
ISBN: 1518506399
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Get Book Here
Book Description
“There’s no way you can do this reentry thing,” Orlando Lucero tells himself after getting out of prison. He has spent most of his life institutionalized, first in an orphanage and then in the Denver Youth Authority for smuggling weed. Orlando knows nothing about freedom. What does one do with it? What is it? His brother promised to teach him the carpentry trade, but Orlando quickly discovers Camilo is—like their parents—an addict, robbing and stealing to feed his habit. So he turns to Lila, his prison pen pal who encouraged both his poetry writing and sexual fantasies. Soon he moves in with her and engages in the acts he dreamed about while incarcerated, but living the straight life seems impossible. “Freedom is full of hazards, lots of sharp edges, and they cut me at every turn.” As he is sucked back into a life of crime, he can’t help but think going back to prison would be a relief. Renowned poet Jimmy Santiago Baca explores in lyrical prose one young man’s attempts to break free from the cycle of addiction, violence and abuse that contributed to his imprisonment and impede his search for happiness and a productive life. In a society that considers him a criminal because of his brown skin, and where those in authority—including a parade of priests when he was just a boy—take advantage of him, Orlando must learn to believe in himself against all the odds, in spite of the institutionalized racism he has endured since boyhood.
Author: Nanette L. Avery
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781495433405
Category : Foster children
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Bringing back to the twenty-first century an epic novel of substance and style, Orphan in America is a compelling fiction that follows three generations across vast distances and the impact of a dark and unfamiliar episode of America's past; the Orphan Train. Set in the 1800s, Orphan in America extends far beyond the genre of historical fiction. This odyssey begins with Alex, an innocent young boy, living in the slums of New York. Like thousands of other children who were transported from overcrowded cities on the Eastern Seaboard during the mid-1800s, Alex is removed from a life of poverty, put on the Orphan Train, and sent to start a new life in America's heartland. But despite the best intentions of a project meant to improve children's lives, Alex's world is forever changed as he is snatched away from his loving yet impoverished parents. Alex is quick to see the advantages of adapting to the ways of the rugged pioneers of Missouri-at least on the outside. As the reader soon learns, his life is intertwined with the tale of Will and Libby Piccard's flight from rural England and their relationship with the powerful Cambridge family of Baltimore. Murder, intrigue, and misfortune collide, unraveling the relentless efforts by Alex's father to reunite his family and the young boy caught up in a scheme of deception. Avery's expressive language and fully realized staging enrich this literary work with an authenticity that brings the saga to life. Unforgettable characters engage readers in a quest to discover more details about the mysterious threads of this fictional tapestry.
Author: Catherine Reef
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618356706
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 156
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Book Description
From the almshouses of the 1800s to the foster home programs of the present, find out about our country's evolving attitudes toward its neediest children.
Author: Walter James
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing
ISBN: 1606939114
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
in a confrontation with his past, the author reveals this heart-wrenching depiction of childhood in a New York City multicultural orphanage during the nineteen fifties.Funds were scarce and discipline severe.He describes the relationships between the orphans, the counselors, the nuns, and the priests, with an emphasis on how it shaped his life.As he grows and moves through various houses into his teenage years, the orphanage is faced with a surge of gang members.He befriends a Puerto Rican his own age, which ultimately leads them both to follow his friend’s brother, a heroin pusher and addict, into Spanish Harlem just at the beginning of the civil rights movement. His account entails descriptions of ghetto life there and in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg district as well, underlining the devastating effects from the separation of his Irish-American family and siblings.While awaiting his next group of students in an empty classroom in South Korea, Walter James attempted to remember his past in an orphanage. The experiences that surfaced put him in a rage.He knew then that he had to confront his past and exorcize his demons.his book, which began as a psychological self-study, became the emotional account of his story, and took him to places he never thought he would visit again.
Author: John E. Murray
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226924092
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
"In The Charleston Orphan House, distinguished economic historian John E. Murray uncovers a world about which previous generations of scholars knew next to nothing: the world of orphaned children in early national and antebellum America. Employing a unique cache of records, Murray offers a sensitive and sympathetic account of the history of the institution - the first public orphan house in the US - while at the same time making it clear that Charleston's beneficence toward white orphans was inextricably linked to the racial ideology of the city's leaders. In Murray's hands, the voices of poor white families in early America are heard as never before." -- Peter A Coclanis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. -- Book jacket.
Author: Diana Loercher Pazicky
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617030937
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
Images of orphanhood have pervaded American fiction since the colonial period. Common in British literature, the orphan figure in American texts serves a unique cultural purpose, representing marginalized racial, ethnic, and religious groups that have been scapegoated by the dominant culture. Among these groups are the Native Americans, the African Americans, immigrants, and Catholics. In keeping with their ideological function, images of orphanhood occur within the context of family metaphors in which children represent those who belong to the family, or the dominant culture, and orphans represent those who are excluded from it. In short, the family as an institution provides the symbolic stage on which the drama of American identity formation is played out. Applying aspects of psychoanalytic theory that pertain to identity formation, specifically René Girard's theory of the scapegoat, Cultural Orphans in America examines the orphan trope in early American texts and the antebellum nineteenth-century American novel as a reaction to the social upheaval and internal tensions generated by three major episodes in American history: the Great Migration, the American Revolution, and the rise of the republic. In Puritan religious texts and Anne Bradstreet's poetry, orphan imagery expresses the doubt and uncertainty that shrouded the mission to the New World. During the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary periods, the separation of the colony from England inspired an identification with orphanhood in Thomas Paine's writings, and novels by Charles Brockden Brown and James Fenimore Cooper encode in orphan imagery the distinction between Native Americans and the new Americans who have usurped their position as children of the land. In women's sentimental fiction of the 1850s, images of orphanhood mirror class and ethnic conflict, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, like Frederick Douglass's autobiographies, employs orphan imagery to suggest the slave's orphanhood from the human as well as the national family.
Author: Marylin Irvin Holt
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803235977
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
"From 1850 to 1930 America witnessed a unique emigration and resettlement of at least 200,000 children and several thousand adults, primarily from the East Coast to the West. This 'placing out,' an attempt to find homes for the urban poor, was best known by the 'orphan trains' that carried the children. Holt carefully analyzes the system, initially instituted by the New York Children's Aid Society in 1853, tracking its imitators as well as the reasons for its creation and demise. She captures the children's perspective with the judicious use of oral histories, institutional records, and newspaper accounts. This well-written volume sheds new light on the multifaceted experience of children's immigration, changing concepts of welfare, and Western expansion. It is good, scholarly social history."—Library Journal
Author: Stephen O'Connor
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 054752370X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
The true story behind Christina Baker Kline’s bestselling novel is revealed in this “engaging and thoughtful history” of the Children’s Aid Society (Los Angeles Times). A powerful blend of history, biography, and adventure, Orphan Trains fills a grievous gap in the American story. Tracing the evolution of the Children’s Aid Society, this dramatic narrative tells the fascinating tale of one of the most famous—and sometimes infamous—child welfare programs: the orphan trains, which spirited away some two hundred fifty thousand abandoned children into the homes of rural families in the Midwest. In mid-nineteenth-century New York, vagrant children, whether orphans or runaways, filled the streets. The city’s solution for years had been to sweep these children into prisons or almshouses. But a young minister named Charles Loring Brace took a different tack. With the creation of the Children’s Aid Society in 1853, he provided homeless youngsters with shelter, education, and, for many, a new family out west. The family matching process was haphazard, to say the least: at town meetings, farming families took their pick of the orphan train riders. Some children, such as James Brady, who became governor of Alaska, found loving homes, while others, such as Charley Miller, who shot two boys on a train in Wyoming, saw no end to their misery. Complete with extraordinary photographs and deeply moving stories, Orphan Trains gives invaluable insights into a creative genius whose pioneering, if controversial, efforts inform child rescue work today.
Author: Linda Gordon
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674061713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
In 1904, New York nuns brought forty Irish orphans to a remote Arizona mining camp, to be placed with Catholic families. The Catholic families were Mexican, as was the majority of the population. Soon the town's Anglos, furious at this "interracial" transgression, formed a vigilante squad that kidnapped the children and nearly lynched the nuns and the local priest. The Catholic Church sued to get its wards back, but all the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled in favor of the vigilantes. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction tells this disturbing and dramatic tale to illuminate the creation of racial boundaries along the Mexican border. Clifton/Morenci, Arizona, was a "wild West" boomtown, where the mines and smelters pulled in thousands of Mexican immigrant workers. Racial walls hardened as the mines became big business and whiteness became a marker of superiority. These already volatile race and class relations produced passions that erupted in the "orphan incident." To the Anglos of Clifton/Morenci, placing a white child with a Mexican family was tantamount to child abuse, and they saw their kidnapping as a rescue. Women initiated both sides of this confrontation. Mexican women agreed to take in these orphans, both serving their church and asserting a maternal prerogative; Anglo women believed they had to "save" the orphans, and they organized a vigilante squad to do it. In retelling this nearly forgotten piece of American history, Linda Gordon brilliantly recreates and dissects the tangled intersection of family and racial values, in a gripping story that resonates with today's conflicts over the "best interests of the child."
Author: Andrea Warren
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
ISBN: 146683448X
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 134
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Book Description
An unforgettable true story of an orphan caught in the midst of war Over a million South Vietnamese children were orphaned by the Vietnam War. This affecting true account tells the story of Long, who, like more than 40,000 other orphans, is Amerasian -- a mixed-race child -- with little future in Vietnam. Escape from Saigon allows readers to experience Long's struggle to survive in war-torn Vietnam, his dramatic escape to America as part of "Operation Babylift" during the last chaotic days before the fall of Saigon, and his life in the United States as "Matt," part of a loving Ohio family. Finally, as a young doctor, he journeys back to Vietnam, ready to reconcile his Vietnamese past with his American present. As the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches, this compelling account provides a fascinating introduction to the war and the plight of children caught in the middle of it.
