Arcelia Calel's English Portfolio

Welcome to my Blog! J

            My name is Arcelia Calel but all of my friends call me Aria or Chuya. I am a freshman living on my own for the very first time, trying to manage every bit of excitement and chaos that has been thrown my way this past year. I haven’t gotten everything right. You can bet I have made many mistakes this year, but I have gained so much knowledge not only worldly but academically as well. Coming into college I was completely overwhelmed. I didn’t know where any of my classes were, where to buy books, or where I was supposed to eat. I had to make serious adjustments because I wasn’t used to spending hours doing homework or studying days in advance. “English is a hard subject! It’s really hard for me to write what I want to say”, this is what I said the first semester of my English class. As time progressed in my English class so did my writing skills. We are now in the second semester of my English class and I am can gladly say that it is my favorite class. We get an assignment, talk about it, look at it through different vantage points, and then write a paper on it. For project text we had to read a graphic novel called “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi. I learned that even though you have situations that are going on around you, you can still find a way to be happy. The second project we did was called project space. For this project I went to Union Station to observe the people and the environment that they were in. I learned that people have the ability to alter their environment and that the spaces that people are in has the ability to alter them. The last project that we did was project web, which was my favorite. For this project we had to talk about how the class affected us and how we grew. It wasn’t my favorite because it was easy; it wasn’t easy at all. It was hard for me to write down what I wanted; I kept changing topics, but once I settled on the topic and got my brain juices flowing I knew that I was going to be happy with the outcome, and I was. This class has had the greatest impact on me than any of my other classes combined (not counting my survival course, but that’s a completely different story). It deeply saddens me that I will not have it again, but I am still glad that I have the experience in my memory.

Project Text 

Why Can’t I Marry a Prince? Social Class!

                        I remember when I was a little girl all I wanted was for my prince in shining armor to come and rescue me, so we could live happily ever after. Unfortunately for me, that still has yet to happen. Why? Not just because I live in America which is a democracy and not a hierarchy but because I come from a low class family. So, even if I did happen to meet a prince I don’t think he would be all that interested. The definition of a social class is a broad group of people in a society that have common economic, cultural, and even political status. In America, people are pretty much allowed to date whomever they please, with regards to their economic conditions.  This may not be the case in other countries. The memoir Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is based on a young girl’s perception on the wars that were going on in Iran throughout the 1980s. In this memoir, Marji discovers the difference between social classes when her maid Mehri falls in love with her neighbor but are forbidden to be with each other because of their economic status. Even though Marji was ashamed of having more money than her friends, she benefitted from it. Coming from a higher social class in Iran or the United States can have both its advantages and disadvantages, though they differ depending on the country. The drawbacks about being from a low social class in Iran were not being able to date outside of your social class, and having the government target and manipulate you. The advantages that higher class people have are the abilities to help people who are in need and economic stability.  If I was from Iran there would have been a better chance that Compton would be affiliated with peace and not gang violence than for me to marry a prince.

            Since the beginning of time a man or a woman has had a broken heart because they were in love with someone they couldn’t acquire. In the States this is usually because the second party in the matter does not reciprocate the emotion of affection. In Persepolis in the chapter “The Letter” it is because Mehri; Marji’s maid is not allowed to date their neighbor’s son because he is not from the same social class as her. Even though Marji grew up with Mehri she never looked at her like a peasant girl. She looked at her as if she was her sister. In Iran, at the time, it was against the law to date outside of your social class, and if someone broke the law not only would down on because he does not have the power to control his household. When Marji’s father found out about their situation, he was livid and went to speak to the young boy himself. He said, “Ok, I’ll get straight to the point: I know that Mehri pretends to be my daughter. In reality she is my maid.” (36-37). He gave the young man the opportunity to pursue his love, but because Mehri was a maid he did not continue seeing her.

            Mehri was not allowed to continue seeing her neighbor, but maybe she is allowed to have a peaceful day at school so she can have time to get over her resent heartbreak. Wrong! Americans have a problem with treating people from different social classes as equals. Some people like to make fun, ridicule, and manipulate people whom they believe are of a lower class stance than them. This is also true in Iran.  Iran’s government went to a lower class’s school to manipulate young uneducated children into joining the war and becoming soldiers. “They come from lower class areas you can tell.. First they convince them that their afterlife will be even better than Disneyland, then they put them in a trance with all of their songs.. Its nuts! They hypnotize them and just toss them into battle, absolute carnage.” (101). The government preyed on the lower class children because they had young, impressionable, and uneducated minds, so that they could raise the numbers of soldiers that they had. On page 101 if you look at both panels, you would be able to clearly see the difference between social classes. On the first panel little kids are being blown up with a key painted gold around their necks, reflecting false promises like false gold. On the bottom of the page on the second panel you can see kids smiling and running around at a party. The contrast shown between the children’s social class is vast.

            You can’t have a good princess without her fairy godmother. Even though social classes can have many disadvantages they can also have advantages. One of them being that the higher social class has the ability to help the lower class. The tax system in America is a fairy godmother to lower income households. Everyone pays taxes. It just happens to be that the people who have a higher income pay more taxes than less fortunate people. With the money that is obtained from the taxes the government makes programs that provide food and clothing to the people that cannot afford it. In Iran my opinion of what a fairy godmother is, is a bit different. Marji’s family did not always have Mehri as their maid.  They acquired her when her family asked them to care for her because they could not afford to keep her fed or clothed. “We have too many children 14 or 15 including her, she will eat well at your house” (34). Mehri’s family had too much on their plate but none of it was food. If it wasn’t for Marji’s family they would have not been able to feed Mehri, leaving her to lead an unfulfilling life filled with starvation and difficult labor.

            Social classes play a huge role in almost every society. Even though they differ from country to country they still have some similarities. In Iran you couldn’t date outside of your social class, but that is not the case back in the States. In both counties the government and its people prey on people whom are weaker than them, it is not fair but true. Despite the differences in economic status people are still people as some feel the need to help those who need it. In this case it was Marji’s family helping Mehri by making her their maid. We will always have social classes but I hope that as time progresses people won’t be so vindictive and malicious towards each other. That people with thrive to ensure that everyone is treated as an equal and can receive the same level of education. People cannot choose the type of class that they are born into. In Iran it is impossible to move up in social class, but in America we have the opportunity to so if we try hard enough. 

Project Space

 Space is infinite

            When I think of the word space I think of the stars, planets and constellations, but if you go to the dictionary and look up the word space it states that it is a continuous area that is available and unoccupied. That is just one definition for space. The definition for space that I am referring to is not common for most people because they easily overlook the space around them due to the fact that they focus on items around them as a unit and not the space and the objects inhabiting it at a whole. The definition for space is far more complex and compound that someone would think. Space not only defines the people within it, but the people within the space define space. Through personal experience, ethnography, Brent Staples’s “Just Walk On By: A Black Man Ponders His Power To Alter Public Space”, Louis Alfraro’s “Minnie Riperton Saved My Life", I was able to better understand the way that space influences the way most people act and that the way people act also has an effect on space.

I grew up in Compton, California. It is classified as “ghetto”.  Even though I was born and raised there, it was not a place I called home. The block that I resided in had a vast majority of African Americans. When I was younger, I had very dark skin and erratic curly hair. I considered myself to be no different from my neighbors. My neighbor, my sister, and I were best friends. When I was four years old I realized that I wasn’t African American. I asked my grandmother for permission to sleepover at my neighbor’s house. She said, “Since she isn’t a family member you can’t”. This caught me off guard.  I asked, “Isn’t she my cousin?” My grandmother replied, “She can’t be your cousin because you are not like her. You are not black like her.” After that situation occurred my grandmother and Nanny raised me to be what they called “one hundred percent Hispanic”, even though I am not. I was forced to only speak Spanish in my household. I had to dress a certain way, have my hair a certain way, and was only allowed to befriend Hispanic girls. They made my sister and me do this because they were scared that we were going to end up like all of the other girls on our block, pregnant with nowhere to go but down. The space that I lived in had a huge impact on the way that I behaved. It affected me mentally, emotionally, socially, and physically.

            Public space is defined as a place that is accessible to all people without regards to race, gender, and religion. I consider Union Station to be a public place so I chose to go there for my ethnography. I have never technically gone to Union Station to go there since I use it as a means of transportation, but I’ve gotten off at that station to go to Olvera Street dozens of times. Union Station is beautiful; the detail that was placed on the sealing is impeccable. When you go into Union Station it doesn’t seem like you are in Los Angeles anymore but some place far away. At the very entrance as you walk in there is an information booth that no one ever seems to go to, a bar to make the time that you are waiting more pleasant, and what seemed to be over one hundred chairs flooding the lobby area. There was a vast variety of people there, all of them from different backgrounds, age groups, and religious groups. Normally, when I think about a varied group of individuals in a space together, I imagine chaos and violence; however, the reality was far from what I imagined.  Mostly everyone there was running to their train. Everyone seemed to know exactly where they were going. No one took a second look at anyone around. It made my sister and me feel like we were lost and late because we were the only ones there that were wondering around slowly and aimlessly, taking time to look at every small detail we could find.  The space that we were in made us act a certain way because it was designed to get people in and out as fast as possible. The chairs in the lobby, though they were beautiful and elegant, were not meant to be sat on for a number of hours. The bars supply only a small number of seats and the restaurants do not supply any. Union Station evoked eagerness to get home; even though I was not far from it, I felt a thousand miles away.

            Everyone has the ability to alter public space in a positive or even in a negative way. In Brent Staples’s “Just Walk on By: A Black Man Ponders His Powers to Alter Public Space”, he alters public space negatively himself and for the people around him. Staples does not do this on purpose. It is just that he is an African American man with a big stature roaming the streets alone at night; he is often stereotyped to be a mugger or a rapist. The first incident which made him realize the way that he altered public space was years ago but it stays in his mind as if it was yesterday. He was walking in a lonely street just him one side and her on the other side walking towards each other when he noticed that the woman seemed to be frightened. She gripped her purse as if bracing herself to be attacked, ran to the sidewalk across the street and continued running until she met the larger street ahead. Both of these people have a stereotype to fulfill in this situation. The black man is expected to mug the white woman and the white woman is expected to either escape or be victimized. If the situation was reversed it would be completely strange. No one expects the big black man to fear the small white lady due to stereotypes. They don’t expect that the black man is a graduate student and that he doesn’t like the fact that his appearance makes people feel threatened or that he whistles in attempt to make the people around him more comfortable. People expect the black man to be something monstrous if he is walking alone at night but expect the woman to cower. What does this say about the way we stereotype people in different spaces?

            Los Angeles is my home. It is where I was able to escape my household stress and just roam around the streets feeling as weightless as a bird. In “Minnie Riperton Saved My Life”, by Louis Alfaro Los Angeles was his home too. He was raised in a tough space. His brother joined a gang so they would not be picked on. The story is about how he did not feel like he belonged to the environment he was is and he escaped his feelings through music. Due to overcrowding in their school they were going to be sent to Valley High a predominantly white school. In order for them not to sick out they bought outrageous clothes. Soon to their realization they were not going to Valley high but Belmont High a school populated with Mexicans. When they got there they did not fit in; everyone around them was wearing band t-shirts, and they were wearing bright shirts and crazy hair. They had to change to adapt to their environment. Alfaro joined a gang and pretended to enjoy bands like Aerosmith so that he would not be made fun of. He found his relief in music. He loved listening to Minnie Riperton and Jazz. Alfaro followed what he thought he should be for the space that he was in, but it was through music and dancing that he was true to himself. He was free, a gay Mexican boy raised in the barrio and a happy soul train dancer.

            Space has the ability to alter the emotions and actions. The space that we are in makes us act a certain way because we do not want to make it seem like we do not belong. Space has the ability to define the people within the space. Since I am from Compton, people would assume that I am “ghetto” or loud and violent; but I am not. I am from Compton; I am sweet; and I am nice; and I’ve lead protests and stood for what I believed in. I am my own person within a space. Even though people will stereotype me to be something I am not, I will show them otherwise; just how Louis Alfaro did and Brent Staples did. I will not be classified to be something that I am not just because of the space that I am in.

Project Web

Thinking about how I want to word things
makes me feel like my head is going to explode.

.English is a Tough Language

I never considered myself to be a strong writer. So when I came to the realization that I would soon be starting my first real college English class I literally shook in my boots. I was afraid that I would not be at the skill level that I was expected to be at and that my teacher would pull out her/his hair in frustration when reading my papers or worst laugh at how bad my writing was. I expected college to be nothing but big lecture rooms with everyone sitting in class quietly taking notes for hours at a time.  I expected the worst from this class. I expected to sit down staring at my laptop with a blank gaze not knowing what to write or what I was supposed to write about. From the first day I was pleasantly surprised with the way my English course was designed.  In this course we took each lesson one step at a time to ensure that we understood the subject at hand to the best of our abilities. It helped me view people, situations, and objects form a perspective that I would have never thought of on my own. It also helped with my writing process it made it easier for me to get my point across thus greatly aiding my writing abilities.

The first assignment that we worked on was a poem entitled “It’s a Woman’s World” by Eavan Boland. Poetry is not my strong suit. It is very difficult for me to understand what authors are trying to convey with their metaphors and similes. When I found out that our first assignment was a poem I thought that there was no way possible that I was going to pass this class, however; I thought wrong. The first time we read the poem I had no idea what it meant but we read it over and over as a class and by ourselves. The teacher encouraged us to asked questions not only to her but our classmates as well.  We broke it down into parts making sure that we understood what each line meant. It was extremely frustrating because I would grasp what one stanza meant but not the other. In order to understand the poem more our professor Kitty Nard showed us videos comparing the song these boots are made from walking by Nancy Sinatra (link to the vidoe) and the other by Jessica Simpson (link to the vidoe), lyrics to the songs , pictures about woman and made us write letters to the speaker, author and to a family member making us explain the questions that we had, what we understood, and how we could relate to the poem. After we wrote out letters we randomly gave them to another classmate and they had to read it out loud to the entire class. When my letter was being read I wondered if it was humanly possible to die of embarrassment unfortunately for me it wasn’t. There were so many mistakes that I failed to see because I didn’t read my letter out loud to myself or to anyone else so I didn’t notice that a great deal of the sentences I wrote did not make sense. Even though I was embarrassed of my work, hearing my peers work made me understand parts of the poem that I couldn’t comprehend very well. This assignment though me to relate what we were reading to a situation that I understood, read my work out loud, and to ask as many questions as I needed.

The second progression of our class didn’t seem to get any easier. We started working on a thing called rhetoric. At first when our professor mentioned it I had no idea what it meant then she said that it to do with the way we wrote that it was ethos, logos, and pathos. I didn’t even think that those words were English! I had no idea what they meant. For our first assignment we got the opportunity to transform words into pictures. I got the lyrics to “You Lost Me” by Christina Aguilera and I painted the emotion that the song was conveying.  The song was very depressing and it was incredibly difficult for me to get my painting how I wanted it, but when I was done with it I realized that I understood what pathos mean which is making the reader feel pity or sadness.  

My Painting for You Lost Me 

Our second exercise was greatly amusing. We got the chance to work in a group and make a skit appealing to persuasion, logos, ethos, and pathos. I still didn’t fully understand what logos and ethos meant so getting a chance to work in a group and have them explain to me in their own worlds helped substantially. At first I was extremely nervous about going up in front of a group of people that I didn’t know very well but I knew that I was not going to be alone and that made it much easier for me to perform. My group performed last and I liked that because I was able to learn from the other groups that performed before mine. The hardest assignment for me in this progression was “Observing Rhetoric at Work”. For this assignment we had to sit and take notes on a conversation that was being held between people and how they used rhetoric in their daily lives. This assignment was very difficult for me because I observed my family on the day that my dad informed us that he was moving to Texas to work.

My Dad Visiting for the Holidays

Even thinking back to it now makes my eyes water. When I started to write my essay I wanted to stop immediately and just observe strangers but I knew I had to let what I was feeling out so I did. I think I spent more time crying than actually writing my essay but after I wrote it the sting I felt in the pit of my gut didn’t hurt as bad as it did before. This progression helped me understand the way emotion, logic, authority, and persuasion are used in everyday conversations.  

My sister Liz and I at Union Station

I didn’t know that my English class was going to be two semesters long but I am glad that it was. In the second semester we went over a graphic novel entitled Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi it was about a little girl’s perception on the wars that were going on around her in Iran. I truly enjoyed this graphic novel because it was not what I expected it to be. Every picture meant something it showed what the words could not. It made me want to take an art class or two. After Persepolis we worked on a thing called “Project Space” which completely changed the way that I viewed my surroundings. For our ethnography I went to Union station with my sister and  it made me realize that when I go places I don’t focus on where I am at but more on the people that are there or the situations that are at hand. After we did “Project Space” I felt like I was slapped in face with a hammer suddenly it all hit. Everything that we did went together. It meshed perfectly. If I think back to all of the assignments that we did I can pick out space and rhetoric from each one. I can also do that in my everyday life now which is substantially improved my writing abilities.

Throughout the entire year I have learned so much more that I thought that I would. I realized that I am a better writer that I give myself credit for. I enjoyed my English class very much and I am happy to say that I my classmates are not just my peers but my friends as well. I don’t think that I will have another class like this again but I have learned so much from it. I became a better writer and my comprehension abilities improved as well. Now, when I am assigned an essay I don’t feel like cowering away from it but taking it by the horns with my newly found confidence in writing.

My class mates and me