What Happens to a Dream Deferred: Accessing Strength in Times of Vulnerability

What with today’s pandemic causing the cancellation of our graduation, it’s easy to wonder if anything that occurred in these past three years were anything more than a fever dream. By ending this graduate training with such an abrupt dissipation, it feels like my dreams have been deferred, without my permission. Langston Hughes, poses the question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” I am not only forced to answer this question as myself, but as Bennie. During the winter quarter of first year, I had the incredible privilege of playing Lorraine Hansberry’s classic, semi-autobiographical Beneatha Younger in “A Raisin In the Sun.” My exploration of Bennie was perhaps one of the most rewarding, intangible gifts I could have ever received-- perhaps because the performance was rooted in the fundamentals. We had created an environment in which we could listen and respond truthfully to one another from the first week we started to block the play, so that by the time our run commenced, our vessels were ready. These impassive times might be robbing us of a graduation ceremony, but it does not negate the intangible gifts we have acquired over the past three years. Whether it be the embodiment of Beneatha, the reclaiming of my physical health, imparting encouragement and wisdom in the classroom, and psychological & spiritual repair, I have rooted myself in the fundamentals which have made me ready. I choose to view my circumstances, my dreams deferred, and access my vulnerability to keep driving my vessel & my dreams alive...much unlike a raisin in the sun

Politics of Language: The California Bilingual Education Initiative

This essay examines issues of power and multiculturalism in relation to the education of children through debate over monolingual versus bilingual education and how language is a source of power

The Power of Poetic Praxis in the Literature of Pat Mora and Ana Castillo

Chicana literary work is predominantly characterized by poetry. Lyrical poetic phrases are interwoven into Chicanas’ short stories, novels, theoretical, and critical essays. Why poetry? What is distinct about poetry as a literary genre or the process of writing poetry that facilitates Chicanas’ self-expression? Various Chicana writers refer to the process of writing poetry as essential to the (trans)formation of identity and society. Poetry allows Chicanas to transform their own identities and to re-define the contours of the world by creating a new or distinct reality from which to act. Collectively, Chicana writers produce a corpus of literary work that is characterized by the commingling of poetry, theory, and criticism. In this article I illustrate that these three phenomena are inextricably linked and that theoretical and critical essays written by and about Chicanas often grow out of and through their more creative, poetic literary work. My analysis focuses primarily on two Chicana authors, Pat Mora and Ana Castillo, and examines how their poetry exemplifies and contextualizes some of their abstract claims and critical theories, as well as how the blending of poetry, theory, and criticism functions as a powerful tool to create socio-political change both in the academy and beyond

Systems-Disconjugacy of a Fourth-Order Differential Equation with a Middle Term

Systems-conjugate points have been introduced and studied by John Barrett \cite{barr} in relation with the self-adjoint fourth order differential equation $$(r(x)y")"-(q(x)y')'= p(x)y,$$ where $r(x)>0$, $p(x)>0$ and $q\equiv0$. In this paper we extend some of his results to more general cases, when $q(x)$ is free of any sign restrictions.Comment: 13 pages, 0 figure