Th new Americans

THE NEW AMERICANS:

On this document we can see one picture and one painting by two different artists showing two types of Americans in two different periods. The painting was created by Grant Wood in 1930 and it is entitled “American Gothic” and the picture was taken by Santiago Forero in 2010 and it is called: “Mexican American Gothic”. These two documents have a lot in common yet a lot of differences. How can we differentiate these two documents?

First of all, we are going to describe the painting of Grand Wood, then the picture of Santiago Forero. In the background, we can see a white house, with a big window in the second floor and the main door. This house looks exactly like the typical American Farmhouses in the 1920’s. In the foreground of the painting, there’s a couple standing in front of the house with a cold and stretched face, long body and traditional farming clothes. The only difference between them is that the man is holding a pitchfork in his right hand.

In “Mexican American Gothic” we can see a couple of Mexican American in front of a weird shaped blue house with three windows and a rectangle in the middle of the house that looks like a door. Its looks like the lower middle-class houses in the US that are quite affordable. In the foreground, the couple is wearing traditional Mexican clothes over their outfit they use to work. The man, on the left is holding a jackplane and the woman has a feather duster in her right pocket.

We can see that these two documents are really similar thus very different. Firstly, we can see that the way the couple is placed in the two documents are the same and we can see a house in the background of both of the documents. However, the most chocking difference is the origins of the couple. On the painting, they look like a normal American couple that owns a farm and that wants to expand their land. Thus, in the picture, we can see that the couple has Mexican origins, maybe they are immigrants who fled their home country to hopefully find a better life in the United States of America. We can see that in the 1930 the people looking for opportunities were farmers, however, in 2010, the people that are looking for opportunities are not farmers but homeworkers with different origins that in 1930. We can see that the society in America has evolved considerably with time.

To conclude, I think that the situation of immigrants in America is very serious and that the country has to find a solution to this problem. Does closing the border between the two country the best solution? In addition to that, I think the picture of Santiago Forero describes well the situation in America.

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