I must say, I quite enjoyed Jose Romero’s The World of Children: Immigrant & Oregene Bound blog post. It was compelling, beautifully rendered and intimate. The short anecdotes Romero shares about his parents immigration narrative takes the blog post into an entirely new level of human connectivity. Its blend of sophistication along with its parallels to N.K Jeminsin’s work makes this blog post insightful and complex.
Not only so, but Romero is also successful in discussing our current political climate and drawing in connections to Jemisin’s series that we’ve been discussing throughout the semester. Although fiction, Romero understands the power of a narrative and the complexities and underlying commentary present in Jemisin’s The Fifth Season. Now, full disclosure: our current political climate is intense, just as Romero explicitly suggested in his post. This we know. From uproar rage from protestors demonstrating their disapproval of the President Donald Trump administration, to media frenzy on Trump’s abnoxious twitter tweets and his “Zero Tolerance Policy” on immigration, to the migrant caravan traveling from Central America to the U.S border, the sexual allegations against now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Jeff Session’s resignation letter to President Trump as Attorney General after recusing himself from the Robert Muller ongoing Russia investigation and well, the list goes on. What Romero does though is delve into the issue of immigration and compare the immigration narrative to that of the narrative of the Oregenes in the world Jemison created. The stillness in The Fifth Season, for Romero, is that similar to the world we live in—Earth.
In the Fifth Season, we learn that in their world there are Oregenes, the Sanzeds and stone eaters. All these groups represent “different races”and although we all know there is only one race—the human race, this metaphorical representation in the novel between the both makes the Fifth Season work in multiple levels of interpretation. Further, the composition of all these groups in Jemisin’s work only further strengthens its powerful connection to the world we live in now- reality. And just like in the world of the Fifth Season, the construction of a superior and inferior race is very well present. Oregenes are outcasted and feared, just as many minority groups are. Romero expresses this similarity throughout his post which made me appreciate it even more. As we grew to learn, the life of an orogene is anything but blissful. In fact, being born an orogene almost guarantees you a life of extreme exploitation with little to no sympathy from your peers. Just as Jija’s narrative, immigrants and minorities often live a life of violence and persecution. In his blogpost, Romero expresses this similarity, specifically, that of the power of the Fulcrum and the U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement and how they both have the authority and power to separate children from their parents. Overall, I must say Romero’s blog post was not only informative but did an excellent job putting things into perspective.