Border Patrol State By Leslie Marmon Silko example essay topic

In the essay "The Border Patrol State" by Leslie Marmon Silko, she tries to inform her audience about her personal feelings for the Border Patrol by portraying the unfair and unruly implementation of the powers that are assigned to Border Patrol officers. She accompanies her thoughts and facts about the Border Patrol with experiences from other individuals who have come across the same type of problems as she encountered. Silko uses these visualizations and facts to sway the audience into believing that the Border Patrol is abusing their powers by randomly pulling people over and harassing them. Silko tries to effectively inform and convince the audience by using many different techniques. The three most important concepts that she uses are the specific audience that she writes to, the mental images that she creates throughout the text and her credibility.

An analysis of the text will determine whether or not it is an effective essay. Silko must choose an audience to write to that will feel sympathetic to her situation. Since, she is a writer, she should know what kind of people will believe in certain techniques of writing; therefore, Silko selects a very emotional tone to write in. Silko seems to have chosen a large; yet, gullible community; someone that, if they were to read her essay, would have no reason or want to disagree with what she says.

For starters, Silko chooses an audience that is not familiar to the region her stories take place in: so she tries to identify with people based outside of the southwest United States. Silko wrote this literary work for white-collared Americans who watch too much television. A people who will believe anything that they are told. She opens up the piece by telling the audience that she used to travel the highways between states and how "that wide open highway told us that we were U.S. citizens: we were free... ". (Silko, 490.

). Silko immediately gains sympathy from her audience by painting a picture that something has happened that makes her feel like she cannot freely pass from state to state. As she draws more and more sympathy from her uninformed audience, Silko will begin to show her bias against the Border Patrol to her informed, more aware audience. To further convince her audience that the Border Patrol abuses their power, she illustrates several moments when a member of the Border Patrol exceeds his or her use of justified power. Silko's very first example of power abuse involves herself.

She explains how she was on her way back to Tucson from New Mexico with her friend Gus. Silko had fallen asleep until about midnight when she awoke to see "emergency flashers of six vehicles-Border Patrol cars and a van were blocking both lanes of the highway". (Silko, 490. ).

She and her pal Gus were ordered to step out of the car without being permitted to inquire as to the reason for the search of their vehicle by both human and canine kind. She even mentioned that the female (who knows as to how she knew it was female) German Shepard; that had seemingly been mistreated be the Border Patrol agents, refused to announce the presence of pot that Silko had been carrying in her purse; as if the dog were on her side. Silko also mentions other stories of doctored power. There was an instance when a Mexican-American football coach driving his fully uniformed team was pulled over and a Border Patrol agent put a cocked revolver to the coach's head. However bad these incidences might seem, she can only name a few. In order for Silko to effectively convince her audience, .

She decides to leave out the other half of the story. There was very little indication of anyone driving right through a Border Patrol checkpoint as the driver and agents smile and wave to each other. These facts; on the other hand, do not compile inside the minds of her intended audience. She uses an array of descriptive words and mental pictures to blind her audience to the fact that she fails to mention that there are two sides to a river. After blocking the minds of the audience with these descriptive ideas, Silko is trying to make the audience believe that this happens to all minorities, even football coaches are not safe to travel "freely". Silko is now starting to separate her intended audience from the people who actually know what generally happens at state border crossings.

Silko hopes that her sympathetic audience is now so far on her side that if they could jump two miles they would still be on her side and the unintended, smarter to the situation audience is gaining more dislike for her biased opinion of the Border Patrol. And last, but not least, Silko incorporates another concept to handcuff her intended audience to her argument: credibility. Credibility will help her argument by giving the audience a good reason to believe what she is saying. In the beginning of her essay, Silko mentions that she was on her way to Tucson from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

She states this because she was on her way home from a book signing for "the paperback edition of my novel Almanac of the Dead". (Silko, 490. ). Having put this image of her as a successful writer in her gullible audience's head at the beginning of her essay, gives them no reason to doubt what she has formulated. Silko also mentions stories about crazed Border Patrol agents from a U.C.L.A. professor and a 73 year old father. This all adds to the blinding wall that she fabricates for her intended audience.

In any case, Silko; ever more, forgets to give any precedent to the Border Patrol that they are just doing there job. They are supposed to pull people over and provide searches of the vehicle and its occupants. Perhaps not in the cases that she mentioned but when someone is stopped because they fall into a specific classification that they (the Border Patrol) are hired to stop and question, Silko fails to give credible evidence that she and her friend Gus were pulled over and searched for no good reason. The Border Patrol was doing their job by conducting this search. The agents were probably looking for illegal immigrants and / or drugs.

The Border Patrol does these tactful searches everyday. With the few exceptions that Silko mentioned in her text, Border Patrol agents are just doing there job After reading Leslie Marmon Silko's "The Border Patrol State", an analysis has shown that her essay is both effective and ineffective. It is effective to a certain point and to a certain audience. This audience has been previously mentioned as a non-southwestern United States, white collar, unaware community. She was effective by blinding these people with outrageous instances in which the Border Patrol (or certain employees) have abused there warranted powers.

The construction of morally vulgare stories allowed Silko to portrait only one side of the Border Patrol. She only allowed her audience to see the bad side of the issue. This essay was very ineffective to another audience however. To the people who live in the southwestern United States and travel regularly or occasionally between two or more states know that Silko has gained an unfair and unreasonable biased towards the Border Patrol.

It seems as if she feels sorry for herself and wants to blame somebody for the persecution that her people went through; therefore, she attacks the only body of government she can. Silko seems to think that because her people's borders were crossed and altered for the better of the majority and with no concern for the minority that she can use a few examples of a few bad apples to say that the whole batch is bad.