Assignment: Please discuss one of the following questions clearly and concisely, focusing your discussion on a single theme or idea. Devote equal space to each question. (at least 1 1/2 typed, double-spaced pages total)

Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo
1.Acosta's attitude toward women seems generally hostile and critical yet at times hopelessly romantic. Given that the novel is ostensibly an autobiography of the writer, how do Acosta's attitudes toward women determine his attitudes about himself, his own self-identity? Compare Acosta's attitudes toward Alice with that of Sylvia, for example. How can Acosta so criticize and so idealize women in the novel alternately? Discuss the importance that women play in determining Acosta's self-identity.

2. After his jail stay in Mexico, Acosta has some kind of epiphany in the last pages of the book, which seems to completely transform him. What sort of plans and goals does Acosta have after getting out of jail? How does his personality change? Why the sudden interest in writing to the President, writing his autobiography, and presenting demands for a new nation "to the United Nations"? How is Acosta transformed finally at the end of the novel and what causes this transformation? Does Acosta know who he is at novel's end? Who is he, then, (or who does he think he is)? What, finally, is the definition of a "Brown Buffalo"? Discuss Acosta's epiphany and the transformation of his identity at the end of the novel.

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/ La Frontera (read 41-64)
Anzaldúa's text in some ways can be thought of as a text that speaks two languages. It is a bi-lingual text that speaks both in Spanish and English. Assuming that the majority of her audience does not speak Spanish, what are her motives in writing much of her text in Spanish? Why not write the whole text in Spanish? Why the switching back and forth? Any pattern to her switching? What sort of things get narrated in English and what type in Spanish? How does the linguistic structure of the text (its bi-lingualism) demonstrate Anzaldúa's larger cultural and political themes in the book? Discuss the structure of, and motives for, the use of Spanish and English in Anzaldúa's work?