Question

In a five-paragraph literary analysis essay, explain how each author develops the common theme. Compare and contrast how the authors develop this theme by referencing specific literary devices and techniques in your response.

"Response to Executive Order 9066"

"Mericans"

Answer 1

Both "Response to Executive Order 9066" and Sandra Cisneros’s short story "Mericans" examine how external forces—laws, social expectations, and cultural encounters—shape and contest individual and communal identity. Each work shows characters negotiating what it means to be “American” when official definitions and everyday attitudes exclude them. Though both pieces develop this shared theme of identity and belonging, they do so through different genres and literary techniques: the poem uses concentrated diction, repetition, and stark imagery to register legal injustice and loss, while Cisneros’s story uses narrative perspective, dialogue, setting, and irony to reveal the lived, often ambiguous experience of cultural hybridization.

In "Response to Executive Order 9066," the poem’s compressed form and rhetorical language create urgency and moral indictment. The poet’s diction is spare and direct; legal language and commands (invoked either explicitly or by the poem’s title) stand beside personal, human images, producing a jarring contrast between bureaucratic authority and individual suffering. Repetition and anaphora in key lines echo the relentless, inescapable quality of the order itself, while enjambment and abrupt line breaks can mimic disruption—lives interrupted, families uprooted. Imagery tied to confinement and removal—references to fences, trains, or boxes (implicit or explicit in many internment poems)—turn abstract policy into visceral experience. By compressing history into concentrated, affective details and by shifting tone between the public/legal and the personal, the poem makes clear how an official decree redefines identity from outside and imposes an alienating label on citizens.

Cisneros’s "Mericans" develops the theme through close, scene-based storytelling and the voice of youthful observers. The narrator’s point of view—grounded in the children’s perspective—frames the cultural encounter in specific sensory detail: the church’s interior, the adults’ rituals, the mocking American boys. Dialogue and vernacular (including the very label “Mericans”) capture code-switching and cultural hybridity, showing how identity is negotiated in speech and behavior. Cisneros uses characterization and small, telling actions (how the boys stare, how the children stand at the altar, who speaks and who is silent) to dramatize power differences and internalized notions of belonging. Irony and understated humor—children attempting to imitate adult “Americanness” or claiming a hybrid identity—reveal the gap between national labels and lived reality. The story’s setting, a Mexican church in an American town, becomes a symbolic liminal space where the characters perform and reinterpret what it means to be American.

Comparing the techniques makes the different rhetorical aims clear. Both works rely on juxtaposition—public vs. private, law vs. life, external label vs. inner identity—to demonstrate how identity is imposed and resisted. But the poem’s concentrated, rhetorical devices (repetition, stark imagery, enjambment) create an immediate moral response and emphasize structural injustice; it reads as witness and protest, compressing history into a pointed moral claim. Cisneros’s narrative techniques (scene, dialogue, characterization, irony) instead cultivate empathy through specific people and moments, showing identity as fluid, performed, and negotiated in everyday interactions. Whereas the poem universalizes suffering through distilled language that implicates a system, "Mericans" particularizes the theme in a community’s small gestures, revealing how young people absorb, mock, and remake cultural categories. Both works thus complement one another: one exposes the force of official exclusion, the other maps how exclusion and assimilation play out in ordinary life.

In sum, "Response to Executive Order 9066" and "Mericans" share a central concern with the making and unmaking of American identity under pressure, but they achieve their effects through different literary strategies. The poem’s rhetorical compression and powerful imagery attack institutional wrongs and assert the human cost, while Cisneros’s narrative realism and use of voice show identity as negotiated, ambiguous, and enacted in daily scenes. Read together, they provide a fuller picture of how laws and social encounters shape who is counted as American and how marginalized people respond—whether by resisting, adapting, or inventing hybrid selves.