Its the spookiest day of the year. The day where the boundary between the living and the dead are blurred, allowing spirits to walk among the living. My favorite time of the year.

Lately I’ve been focusing on the structure of my thesis. As I’ll explain in my presentation today, I want to structure my thesis into three major parts. childhood, ranging from 0 to 10, adolescence, ranging from 11-17, and adulthood ranging from 18 to Now. Each being a filled with crucial information on why I started the journey of searching for my identity.

As for the Literature review, I have 6 articles that will be extremely beneficial and can be used for multiple parts of my thesis. I also have 4 books, 2 of which I will relating to (these are the memoirs Minor Feelings -Cathy Park Hong and In the Country We Love -Diane Guerrero) and the other two are more for inspiration. The Poet X centers around the struggles that come with a strict Hispanic household and it’s written in verse. so it’s a great source to learn how to tell a story in this format. I wrote this, for you, is one of the poetry books that has impacted me greatly more than any other contemporary poetry that I’ve read. When I brought this book to class it may have not seem like a lot material to go off but it’s actually part of a bigger collection. There’s actually about 4 books titled I Wrote This For You (or some variant of that)

My writing has been slow for the most part. I find myself being over whelmed with the work of other course, and entertaining the most important family guest, my Grandma who is visiting from Ecuador for about 2 weeks. I manage to push out a few poems and short memory recollections here and there but not as much as I want.

Anyhow, since we’re meeting digitally today, I’ll link my reading here.

I’ve taken these last two weeks to really read my articles and kind of see how my family and I fit into these theories. The main articles of focus were two written by Mirna E. Carranza, and honestly, I felt like I was reading about myself throughout both articles.

The first titled, “SALVADORIAN WOMEN SPEAK: Coping in Canada with Past Trauma and Loss,” gave me insight to a side of my family’s postwar traumas that I’ve seen play out in real time, but never acknowledged. Carranza goes through 4 coping strategies that many of the women use to come to terms with the postwar traumas. Spoiler alert: every single one is actively used in my family!

The one the stuck out to me was “no pensar,” which translates to “don’t think,” and this is essentially the women actively choosing not to allow their traumas to drown them by not thinking about them. This is definitely a coping mechanism for many family members of mine. But, what interests me is the fact that this explains so much in terms of their inability to communicate. This also plays into their need for self-reliance.

In relation to myself, this unfortunately came down the pipeline and filtered to me. I mean, I’ve always struggled to communicate what I feel. This is why I write; I need to put it somewhere other than within myself.

That realization alone was enough to make me feel like I’m moving in the right direction in terms of my thesis. It makes sense why I’m itching to search my memories and find my place in the Salvadorian community. I feel like this will be some weird form of communication between my ethnicity and I.

One more thing: I have sat down with my mother and I have an itinerary building up for my trip in January. Most of the locations are within her village and my father’s. They are on opposite ends of the country, so I feel like this will be an interesting lens to look through. I have six days and hardly any internet. Seven year old me would think I’m insane for doing this.

This week I took time and looked more into the structure of my thesis. I have so many creative ideas that I desperately need to narrow down, so I know what I’m actually creating. Because I have so many forms of media to include, I’m really leaning towards going a similar route to the E-Lit website. That is where the idea spawned from anyway. I feel like it could act as an organizer in a way. As for the research, I am categorizing them by context versus content.

I know those are two broad categories but it’s helping me navigate through the research articles a bit. I think of context as histories, social movements, etc. and content has more to do with individualized research – so like the more creative references that’ll inspire my thesis. Essentially, I’m separating the scholarly research with the creative research.

I know the gears have to start turning a lot quicker than what I’m doing right now, but I think I finally have a better grasp at the final end product that I want in terms of research. The visual end product needs to be cleared ASAP.

(Quick explanation for this title, squirrels often hide nuts in the ground and never in one place. Safer to have multiple caches of nuts than one big one. However, some of these caches are…forgotten or left behind. Since I don’t have the fear of having my cache of valuables stole, I’ll place them all in one place and avoid being a squirrel)

I had a very lengthy conversation with my friend, peer, and confidant, Daniel. He and I had a similar experiences in our lives regardless of our upbringing. He’s Pentecostal while I was raised catholic. Why am I mentioning this? Well because religion is another aspect of my life, my identity that I’ve avoided. My family was never big on going to church, however they raised us to be good moral people. They always told us to believe in God but never in the word of man. It cant be trusted. Man can be greedy, self-centered, egotistical, evil, selfish. SO this is my stance on it on religion and how played a role in my identity, I’ll have to write on it some more to get all of my thought on it out from the prison in my mind.
One other thing that I will be focusing on is the idea of trust. I want to write about this a lot more before I tell the digital ether about it.

On the topic of Organization. I have made a Google folder for everything. I have made subfolders for books of a similar fashion (memoirs in verse and poetry books) then folders for the old dead white guys that inspired my love for literature and poetry. I’m debating if i should make a folder for songs or music that have impacted me.

This is one of my favorite poems. Its currently fighting for first place against Max Dhrmann Desiderata. It clearly depicts the anxiety within me and the unsureness of everything.

For the research articles I’ve decided to separate them by topic: one for DACA articles, one for articles on Theological identity, one for trauma responses. I could go more general and just make folders with general topics like legal, psychology, theology, memoir, etc. For now I’ll leave it as until I get more articles. (articles that I know ill use)

My next steps for the Lit review is to scour the databases for psychology articles on identity and/or trauma. Id like to avoid making this an APA psych thesis and somehow have my article give some justification for my thoughts. I’m trying my best to avoid Freud and his coked out Oedipus complex diagnosis…if that’s possible.

I’m super excited for Gianna Presentation, and hope to collaborate or discuss religious inspirations and maybe share found articles on this topic.

This was probably the easiest research reading I‘ve had to do in a while because I was genuinely interested and needed to know more. I’ve found roughly 5 articles this past week, emphasis on roughly. I mean, yes, they grab my interest but I’m kind of trying to see how they can work together. I’m trying hard to not find too much unrelated material and just grabbing whatever interests me.

From last class, I kept the words “forgotten memories,”in my head as I was looking for key terms to start researching. A lot of the articles I found and noted down for myself had to do with acculturation and the different effects it can have on mothers versus daughters. The other half of the research I touched upon had to do with postwar El Salvador. This is super important to me because this was the war that my parents had fled from, yet I know nothing about it besides the destruction and violence caused.

The postwar articles I think will be useful in that they show the war’s effect on a grand scale, so it’ll help me come up with how to word interview questions. Like I said, I really don’t want to go over there and ask tough, traumatic questions to my family. I think this will help dig up related concerns though.

The acculturation articles are interviews, so obviously it’ll help to see some type of structure. But, one article, “Navigating Personal Borders: Recovering Memories of Identity and Culture,” really caught my attention. There is an interview where the interviewee, a woman born in Mexico but was brought to the US at 3 years old, tells her childhood story through photos.

I’ve mentioned previously that I wanted to incorporate photo in my work too because things that I don’t remember in my actual memory, I can always find them in old family photos. The interviewee had the same idea and it’s really interesting to see my thought process play out in this article.

One more piece that aligns with what I’m trying to dig up is called, “Solito”. It’s a NY Times Bestseller from a Salvadorian writer, Javier Zamora, who recounts his experience in migrating to the US as a child. This book has brought so many things to the surface for me already and it just feels like it fell into my lap at the right time. Since I’m going for a more creative approach, this is definitely an important source to have.

For now, this big jumble is all I have, but before I go further into research, I want to take what I have, organize them, make sure they actually work for me, and hopefully apply it to what I’m trying to create.

I believe that the literature review will be the toughest part for me to complete. Since I’m thinking of doing a memoir in verse I have found a some stories in verse, and lots of autobiographies.

• Crank by Ellen Hopkins (YA fiction in verse)
• In the Country We Love by Diane Guerrero (Autobiography)
• Someone Like Me by Julissa Arce (Autobiography)

and from our trip to the library I found lots of articles on DACA. The struggle of Individuals like myself, the discourse around policy and the effects it may have on their health.

• Becerra, Cesar. “Keep the Dream Alive: The DACA Dilemma.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, vol. 40, no. 6, Dec. 2019, pp. 847–58. 
• Billini, Alicia. Dreamers: Stories of DACA Recipients in Higher Education during the 2018-2021 Political Climate, Western Michigan University, United States — Michigan, 2021.
• Becerra, Cesar. “Keep the Dream Alive: The DACA Dilemma.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, vol. 40, no. 6, Dec. 2019, pp. 847–58. 
• Patler, Caitlin, et al. “Uncertainty about DACA may Undermine its Positive Impact on Health for Recipients and their Children.” Health Affairs, vol. 38, no. 5, 2019, pp. 738-745,745A.

Out of these seven sources I’ve found, I believe the first two are going to be the most impactful right now. Since CRANK is written in verse and In the Country We Love is about the family of actress Diane Guerrero being deported at 14. (a fear that every child of immigrants has). I’ve also been doing a lot of freewriting about, myself, my life my experiences. and here if you can read my chicken scratch is the last one I did.

So if you can read any of that, I want to fixate on the line. “melting my young culture and adopting a new one whilst its being plated in Ecuadorian gold”. To think that came out of my brain during a solo writing session in which I was just going to toss out.
Now to pour this into research, I need to find sources that deal with the dangers of assimilation, or loss of identity or the journey of finding identity. I will start writing poems on my own identity, on why I’m here, who I am and want to be, but its easier said than done. I honestly feel as if I’m staring at an abyss of my own creation. Of things I’ve forgotten or willingly set aside. It’s staring back at me, like a parent sitting across a dinner table waiting to have a long overdue conversation.

The sources I found on DACA are great information on the ongoing discourse of immigrants like me, but I only see them as background to my experience. In the planet of Erik its the most currently level that shifts and changes. How its effects my education and my health and my ability to continue living here. However, my identity struggles will continues regardless if I reside in the US or get tossed back to Ecuador. They’ll be the same struggles from the Latino lens. I’m too white, my broken Spanish, and my sense of not belonging to name a few. This odyssey I’ve decided to undergo has brought up a feeling of being lost. Its an identity crises that I’ve been avoiding.