Barrio Boy

Here is a list of key characters in Barrio Boy and their roles: Ernesto Galarza is the book's protagonist, an intelligent, resilient, hard-working young man uprooted from a small village in Mexico...

Galarza uses dialogue and direct characterization to describe the events of his childhood. Galarza often incorporates dialogue directly into the paragraph when he characterizes someone, such as his...

Ernesto and his mother communicate with Miss Hopley with the aid of a student interpreter. After Ernesto and his mother are comfortably settled in her office, Miss Hopley opens a door in the far...

The desire to stay in the small Mexican village in which Ernesto was born would have been related to familiarity and culture. Life in Jalco was comfortable and familiar to our protagonist and...

The first thing that Ernesto mentions is the size of the school, which took up a half block and was three stories tall. The wooden building was also new and painted yellow. A specific difference...

Barrio Boy is an autobiography that was written by Ernesto Galarza. It is about the experiences of a Mexican boy who moves from a small village in Mexico to a barrio in Sacramento, California....

Throughout his autobiography, Ernesto Garza provides numerous examples of causes and effects that altered his life. Garza explains how widespread violence and poverty shaped his childhood in...

A personal philosophy of values can be defined as an individual making personal choices to define right and wrong behavior as opposed to external laws or culture determining right and wrong for the...

In part 1 of Ernesto Galarza’s autobiography Barrio Boy, Galarza writes about going on missions. While the term missions makes what Galarza is doing dramatic and thrilling, what these missions...

Ernesto Galarza is the author and narrator of the book, Barrio Boy. Ernesto begins the narration of his story by recounting his early childhood in a tiny village in rural Mexico. He vividly...

In the book Barrio Boy, author Ernesto Galarza describes the culture of the rural mountain village of Jalcocotán, one of the oldest towns in the Mexican state of Nayarit. Ernesto Galarza writes his...

Barrio Boy is in large part the story of Ernesto's immigration to the United States and his attempts at maintaining connections to his heritage while adjusting to US society. Given this, one might...

In Barrio Boy, Miss Hopley is the principal of the Lincoln Elementary School. Ernesto describes her as a "giant," as she is rather tall, but she is also very kind and friendly. We learn that she...

Mexican American literature struggled to be published before the beginning of the 1970s. It was only in this time that the genre of nonfictional Mexican American literature finally began to find...

The two memoirs are similar because the center on boyhood experiences that include poverty and hard work; they are different in locations and family situation, and the authors are different...

For Ernesto and his family—indeed, for Mexican immigrants to the United States in general—the customs they observe in their new country are initially quite strange. To be fair, Ernesto acknowledges...