Gonzalez 1

Jorge Gonzalez Tejeda

February 5, 2020
CAS 113 B
Professor Encinias

First Theme - Discrimination

I believe that the author from the far away brothers knows that the Florez Twins are suffering
from discrimination. While working to assist young immigrants in Oakland, California, the
author Markham meets Raúl and Ernesto Flores from El Salvador who have experienced many
difficult situations during their journey to the United States. The twin brothers have suffered
from gang violence since they were young. They both came unaccompanied to the United States
looking for a better life. When going to school they were separated and were put into different
classrooms. For the Flores twins, it was a bad thing to do because Ernesto was being
discriminated against because he was speaking Spanish. Also, there was a place called La
Colonia and it was full of gangsters. In addition, Markham introduces the reader to their older
brother Wilber, who acts as the boys’ guardian despite being only 24, and their sister Maricela,
who was left behind in La Colonia to deal with an unplanned pregnancy and the family’s debt.
Markham also visits a Mexican migrant shelter, the border wall in southern Texas, and an
immigration courthouse to give further context. Markham provides a sensitive and eye-opening
take on what’s at stake for young immigrants with nowhere else to go. She wants to let the
readers know that discrimination fro migrants it’s being part of the American culture since a long
time ago. Sometimes migrants need that opportunity to have an education or even stay in this
country instead of being deported to their motherland where especially young people are dying
constantly.

Second Theme - Violence and education

The Far away brother’s book has shown me in the first five chapters that violence is one of the
biggest implications for what Ernesto and Raul have suffered. Since they have to cross the
Guatemala and El Salvador borders while coming to the United States. Being exposed to danger
when you are fifteen years old is because there is really something going on there. Even though
they paid the coyote, they were happening in these horrible zones where they were seeing
skeletons in the desert. People have died in the desert when coming to the United States. From
what I have read, the Mexican border with the United States is one of the dangerous places that
can exist, small cities like Reynosa are under control of businessman, coyotes and the narcos,
that means that those coyotes who help the migrants to cross the border are involved with drugs
 Gonzalez 1
which make it dangerous for young people like Raul and Ernesto on their journey to the United
States. For example, migrants leave the road well before the checkpoint and head out into the
desert’s tangle of scrub and tumbleweed. Also, most migrants travel under cover of night and
they have to avoid snakes, thorns, and many other dangerous animals. However, border patrol
takes place in violence because they are hunting migrants., they don’t care who they are and why
they are trying to leave their motherland. In addition, violence for migrants has caused them to
lose their lives.