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    A Study Guide for Pat Mora's "Elena"
    A Study Guide for Pat Mora's "Elena"
    A Study Guide for Pat Mora's "Elena"
    Ebook32 pages19 minutes

    A Study Guide for Pat Mora's "Elena"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Pat Mora's "Elena," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 2, 2016
    ISBN9781535822572
    A Study Guide for Pat Mora's "Elena"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Pat Mora's "Elena" - Gale

      10

      Elena

      Pat Mora

      1984

      Introduction

      Hispanic American poet Pat Mora, a native Texan, writes about the feelings of struggle and isolation experienced by a Mexican American woman in her poem Elena. In this free verse poem (a poem that eschews formal structures such as metrical patterns and rhyme schemes), Mora explores the barrier posed by the English language to Mexican immigrants like Elena, the narrator of the poem. English is an obstacle in Elena's ability to understand her children, who have learned to speak English fluently, whereas the Spanish-speaking Elena has not. Mora's descriptive poem evokes sentiments of exclusion, humiliation, and fear, and explores such feelings thematically rather than relating a story or event in a chronological fashion. Mora describes the ways in which Elena attempts to learn English, despite both her husband's disapproval of this decision and her children's exclusion of their mother from their conversations and laughter. In exploring Elena's motivations to learn the language of her adoptive country, Mora demonstrates the subject's urgent sense of need to accomplish her goal, not for her own sake, but for the sake of her children. Despite Elena's missteps and mispronunciations, and her embarrassment regarding her shortcomings, she is depicted by Mora as a brave, loving, and persistent woman.

      Mora's Elena was first published in the collection Chants, originally released in 1984. The second edition was published in 1994 by Arte Publico

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