Two works that have similar themes are the short story “Puertoricanness” by Aurora Levis Morales and the poem “Tony Went to the Bodega but He Didn’t Buy Anything” by Martín Espada. The short story and poem follow two Puerto Rican people and how they struggle to find themselves and live their lives without assimilation. Both of the main characters find themselves through reconnecting with their culture after being alienated from it. The overall theme of both works is that culture can be a part of someone’s personality and through embracing that, they can feel truly happy. In “Tony Went to the Bodega but He Didn’t Buy Anything” the reader sees Tony grow up while being surrounded by his culture. When he worked at his local bodega, he felt more…show more content… Morales compares the “mulberry trees of Chicago, that first summer, had looked so utterly pitiful beside her memory of flamboyant and banana…” (596). This is like when Tony first moved to Boston and all he saw was “a landscape of hostile condominiums and the darkness of white faces” (Espada, 26-28). Here, they are both seeing their surroundings as looking sad or oppressive because they are not similar to their homes. Morales then goes on to say that “not even the individual trees and bushes, but the mass of them, the overwhelming profusion of green life that was the home of her comfort and nest of her dreams (596). Moving to a new country was hard enough, but taking into account that the city of Chicago looked nothing like Puerto Rico made the transition harder for her. By saying that it was not just the “individual trees and bushes” Morales makes me think that the main character wouldn’t find comfort in small pieces of Puerto Rico, she needed it in its entirety. She wanted the nest that would comfort her. Like a baby bird, she must leave her nest and go on to grow up. This is what she is doing in Chicago and see her slowly find
