The main theme of Richard Blanco’s poem “Como Tú / Like You / Like Me” is the relationship between immigration and identity. In focusing on the experiences of foreign-born residents of a new country, he centers on those whose parents brought them as children. Blanco incorporates the issues of memory...
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The main theme of Richard Blanco’s poem “Como Tú / Like You / Like Me” is the relationship between immigration and identity. In focusing on the experiences of foreign-born residents of a new country, he centers on those whose parents brought them as children. Blanco incorporates the issues of memory and language into the larger question of identity. The speaker points out that their memories of the land they left are vague, and they also feel alienated from the different sounds of another language.
Literary devices include simile and metaphor. A simile is a comparison of unlike things for effect using like or as. A metaphor is a direct comparison of unlike things for effect.
Like a mirror, I gaze
into my palm a wrinkled map I still can’t read,
my lifeline an unnamed road
In these lines, a simile is used in the speaker’s comparison of the palm of their hand to a mirror, using like. Metaphors are also used in calling the palm a map and saying that the lifeline in the palm is a road.