What Is The Purpose Of The Barrio

What is the purpose, function, or effect on the reader?

Barrios are everywhere: in playgrounds and workspaces; in churches and bars; in estates and small houses. The feeling of division does not discriminate. Barrio has come to mean hispanic sectors of a town or city, characterized by poverty and high crime rates. Barrios of this sense are physically divided, but more importantly culturally divided.Homo sapiens, and all members of the animal kingdom, are inclined to form groups, or barrios, categorizing themselves and others based on physical appearance and like mindedness. The key difference, however, is that unlike humans, animals realize that divisions within their own species do not favor survival, but like humans, still form groups anyway.. …show more content…
Though the narrator’s eyes the barrio is the place with bars with “rudely hung Playboy foldouts” and the place of “color-splashed homes”. The barrio is the place where puddles become “an incubator for health hazards” and the place where the “denseness of multicolored plants and trees give the house[s] the appearance of an oasis or a tropical island hideaway, sheltered from the rest of the world”. The barrio is the place where “the leprous people are isolated from the rest of the community” and the place where “small barefooted boys … give their earnings to mamá”. The barrio is a place of beauty and ugliness. The words “rudely hung”, “incubator for health hazards”, and “leprous” have very negative connotations that emphasize the ugliness of the barrio. On the other hand, the vivid descriptions of the beautiful sights the barrio has to offer, the “color-splashed” houses, the “oases” that are the homes, and the sight of “small bare-footed children” paint beautiful pictures in the minds of Ramirez’s audience that contrast sharply with the ugliness the other words …show more content…
One also gets the sense that the writer is weary. The beauty of the barrio would be the sense of unity among the people. The poignant memories would be the divisions within and outside the barrio. The sentences in some parts of the essay are drawled which suggests the author is reflecting on something, perhaps a distant memory of the barrio. Ramirez wrote that change “eludes their reach, in their own backyards, and the people, unable and unwilling to see the future, or even touch the present, perpetuate the past.” The sentence here is slow with many pauses, suggesting the writer is tired. Perhaps the reader is tired of the unnecessary divisions he witnesses in the city. Ramirez states that in the barrio “the color-splashed homes arrest your eyes, arouse your curiosity, and make you wonder what life scenes are being played out in them.The flimsy, brightly colored, wood-framed houses ignore no neon-brilliant color.” Once again the sentences are long and slow; however, their imagery (the bright, colorful, flimsy houses) suggest a tone of nostalgia, a sense of looking back at times that are beautiful. Ramirez’s use of sound such as in the sentence “the train, its metal wheels squealing as they spin along the silvery tracks, rolls slower now.” The use of the consonant sound of the letter “s” is soft and