Ruben Amaya: Columbian Convo Partner

     My first meeting with my conversation partner, Ruben Amaya, went much smoother than I thought it would. In trying to coordinate a meeting place and time, the English in his emails was misleading of how good his English actually is. For example, we planned to meet in the library but he went to Barnes and Noble. This is a completely understandable mistake, but as it turns out, his English was impressive and only a few times did he use his portable translator on his phone to find the right English word for what he was describing. Ruben is from Cali, Columbia, and told me that he took English all through high school and some in college as well. His aunt has lived in Texas for thirty-one years so she helped him with his English when he first arrived. In Columbia, he studied industrial engineering for five years “at university” and is now working at a phone company retail store.

     To my surprise, Ruben did most of the talking during out meeting. He was openly conversational and told me many interesting things about his home country. He said that the Columbia everyone thinks of when they hear the name of the country is one plagued by crime, drug cartels and murders. However, he loves Columbia and stated that the country is getting better and the crime rate is decreasing. He also said that many American tourists come there regularly despite what they hear in the news. He believes that the media has a big part in the global representation of his home country. They never show any of the good happening in the country and only when there is a story involving the drug lords is Columbia even mentioned, therefore giving it a bad public image. He feels safe in Cali, the city he is from, but by no means as safe as when in Fort Worth. He loves the security that being in the States gives him.

     He asked me about my major, which is Film, and he showed an immediate interest in the study of it. He said that in his hometown, they had three movie venues with two or three theaters in each. They would show mostly American movies, but occasionally some Columbian movies as well. Also, in Fort Worth, he said he goes to the theaters around town on a regular basis. I can understand how seeing movies in English might be a good way to practice the language. Being able to hear people talk in the language for an hour and a half to two hours might be a huge benefit, especially in expanding his vocabulary. I am an Italian minor and I know that when I watch a movie in Italian, I come out of that movie at least feeling like I know more or can speak more of the language.

     Ruben told me about some of the customs and traditions of Columbia that interested me. He said that each city in Columbia has their own local traditional festival each year. For Cali, it is from December 25th-30th. The capital, Bogota, has theirs sometime in July. During these festivals, there is no work, everyone just celebrates and relaxes and eats and drinks and has a good time. Also, he told me that in America his name is Ruben Amaya, but in Columbia, the last names of mothers and grandparents are also included in the name. Ruben said he could only remember seven of his names just because it went back so far, but that is still incredible. I could not imagine my name being Brandon Gregory Somerhalder Laham Throckmorton Salome. Overall, in our hour and a half long talk, Ruben and I kept a great conversation and I’m excited to meet again.

Time Magazine 3/14/1932

I chose a March 14th Time Magazine article from the year 1932 to conduct my library research. The reason I chose this year was because I knew that this was right in the heart of the Great Depression and I wanted to get a sense of the variety of articles and advertisements a society in such a slump was reading.

The first thing that stands out to me is the advertisements. The article starts out with fourteen pages of pure advertisements with no articles in between. It would be interesting to compare an article from this time period with one from before the Great Depression to see if such an emphasis was placed on promoting the product as it is in the 1932 issue.

The characteristics of the advertisements are equally as interesting. In modern magazines, the attention of the ad is usually placed on a picture endorsing the product and then a catchy jingle or motto of the company, usually kept quite short. For example, a McDonald’s ad might have a large picture of a young couple smiling and laughing, each enjoying a Big Mac and fries, with “I’m lovin’ it” and the trademark golden arches finishing off the promo. However, in the Time, advertisements explaining and detailing the product are abundant. One two-page ad for the “Packard Light Eight” car has over four-hundred words, the only pictures being of a profile of the car itself and a four inserts of the interior design. Another ad for Johns-Manville Heat, Cold, Sound and Motion describes a story of a trial in which the jury could not convict an obviously guilty suspect because of “faulty acoustics” in the courthouse. The marketing methods and strategies have clearly changed dramatically. What this says about the society of that period is that they read much more intensively than our society of today. People in the modern Internet culture are known to be “skimmers,” merely glancing over articles and ads when reading through a magazine. I don’t believe ads from 1932 placed in a magazine today would have any impact at all and might actually irritate the reader for making them read such lengthy segments about the product.

While there were no articles during the first fourteen pages of ads, there were letters sent to the editors. Some of the letters were interesting, but the main thing that I noticed was that all ten letters published were addressed to “Sirs,...” This just reemphasized to me the domination men had in the workplace at this time. Women were still “housewives” while the men did the work, and therefore every editor would in fact be a "Sir."

The real contents of the magazine, the articles, were divided into eighteen subcategories: Aeronautics, Art, Books, Business and Finance, Cinema, Education, Foreign News, Letters, Medicine, Milestones, Music, National Affairs, People, Press, Religion, Science, Sport and Theatre. Without even reading a single article, one is able to assess a certain amount about the people reading this magazine. The easiest thing to notice about these categories is the broad spectrum of disciplines that are covered here. Those interested in art and pop culture (Art, Books, Cinema, Music, People, Theatre), the government and economy (Business and Finance, Foreign News, National Affairs, Press), science (Medicine, Science) and any other broad range of subjects are all covered in this magazine.

The articles themselves are keyed toward the same intensive readers as the ads, with long write-ups, small print and few pictures. As I moved further into the article section of the magazine, however, I again became distracted by the amount of advertisements, which were now placed around relevant articles based on the category I was in. For example, in the “Aeronautics” section, the articles were surrounded by advertisements for Autogiro Company of America and United Air Lines (United’s prices for a flight from New York to the Pacific Coast were $160.00... If only that were true today. The flight was also thirty-one hours long... wow).

As a film major, I was interested to see the cinema section, which includes reviews of the new movies of the week. Such films for March 14, 1932 were Strangers in Love (Paramount), Sky Devils (Howard Hughes), The Impatient Maiden (Universal), and After Tomorrow (Fox). I found it amazing that studios such as Paramount, Universal and Fox, which are still dominant in the industry today, were such powerhouses even back in 1932. The reviews talk about the hype leading up to the movie, the stars, the plot, and how the movie was. Perhaps because I’m more interested in these type of articles, I found this section to be more similar to modern magazine articles and therefore much easier to read.

It is amazing how much one is able to infer about a society just from reading one magazine from that time period. I picked this issue in 1932 because I wanted to see if the impact of the Great Depression could be felt through the words and pictures of this magazine. The abundance of advertisements were the obvious characteristic I was looking for. In an economy where all confidence is lost within the consumer, magazines are trying to help stimulate the market by rebuilding the loyalty between the people and the product. This Time Magazine was fifty-six pages long. When I separated the articles and the advertisements, I discovered that about twenty-four of the fifty-six pages were actually articles and the other thirty-two were all ads. This magazine gave me a chance to get a glimpse of the 1932 society deep within the hands of the Great Depression and I found it truly interesting to compare it to our modern culture.

The Man Who Was Almost A Man Reflections

  The plot of this story by Richard Wright is not a confusing one - a boy wants a gun, he buys a gun, he accidentally shoots a mule, he runs away - but the underlying themes, symbols, autobiographical references and overall subject matter could be talked about for days. And while this was the story that my group and I discussed in our 45 minutes of fame leading the class, I found The Man Who Was Almost A Man especially interesting.

Essentially, this story was about a kid who could not fit in anywhere. Dave, a 17-year-old black boy, is constantly bullied by the other black people in the community. “Whut’s the use talking wid em n****** in the field?...Them n****** can’t understan nothing. One of these days he was going to get a gun and practice shooting, then they couldn’t talk to him as though he were a little boy.” And at the same time, being a black in the South in the 1930s-40s, Dave is not accepted by the white community either.

This is a direct relation to the life of the author, Richard Wright. In 1927, at the age of 19, Wright moved from his home in Mississippi to Chicago and the John Reed Club, a group noted for its communist ideals. From there, he moved to New York, where he became acquainted with more communists. However, the white communists rescinded their offer to find him housing, thereby leaving him out of their group. Moreover, the black communists considered him a bourgeois intellectual assimilated with white culture (even though Wright’s highest level of formal education was simple grammar) and kept him out of their group. Knowing this, it is interesting to see how this isolation transposed onto paper within his characters. The morning after buying the gun, Dave reflects on his new possession: “In the gray light of dawn he held it loosely, feeling a sense of power. Could kill a man with a gun like this. Kill anybody, black or white.” This is obviously an example of the presence of racism in the south during that time, but Dave’s hatred toward both races shows the true isolation of this character (and author), and one can see how Wright could eventually come to befriend such people as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, known existentialists.

The glaring irony in this story was also noteworthy. The name of the story is The Man Who Was Almost A Man because it is the story of a boy searching for manhood. Power and control are what he believes a true man possesses, and this is why he acquires the gun, something which will give him power over anyone and everyone. However, what I believe to be attributes of a man are responsibility, maturity and poise. Dave works and earns money, but nobody believes him to be mature enough to handle this money. Therefore, he must go through his mother to “purchase” or “acquire” his manhood with the gun. In fact, he can’t even confront his father, which is probably the best example of manhood he sees regularly. After purchasing the gun, Dave hides his from his family, the first of many examples that he is not responsible enough to own one. Just after shooting Jenny, he immediately begins forming a lie about what happened; he is not able to take responsibility for his actions. The last major example of this comes at the end of the story when Dave decides to jump on a train going North with just an empty gun in his possession. He leaves to search for manhood, but in essence, he is leaving to escape the responsibility of paying for his actions. He has not learned from his mistake.