"For My People" Example #1

Some students took a humorous approach...Zach's poem also has a somewhat aggressive tone (though lighthearted), which was common in many poems....Many of the poems seemed to embrace stereotypes, which makes readers feel a bit uncomfortable, but I think that's part of their effectiveness. I have no idea, though, whether students consciously did this...

In some cases, I felt like some of the poems just read like a list of stereotypes, which I'm not sure, by itself, makes for effective poetry, though I can see how it might be a sort of disempowering of those stereotypes...I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. I liked that most students, like Zach, played with stereotypes but also made visible some of the invisible work  or qualities of their "people" (i.e. in Zach's poem, he calls attention to the Mexican migrant laborers who pick fruit, and Mexican artists' contributions to the hip-hop, etc.).