Hello! Here is my paragraph. [This paragraph relates to my previous thesis that relates to race and gender in 1957. My paper is no longer going in this direction.]
For my research, I found Feeling Pretty by Negron-Mutaner to be the most useful. It pretty much sums up my entire claim on the way Puerto Ricans are treated and isolated in West Side Story. “… West Side Story represented Puerto Ricans as part of a community … The Puerto Rican community was not hailed only as criminal, but also as racialized an colonized,” reads paragraph 7. Focusing heavily on the racial divide in West Side Story, Feeling Pretty was the most relevant and useful to my research. An example of the “conversation” I’ve found can be seen in this essay: https://onesearch.cuny.edu/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=TN_proquest219231637&context=PC&vid=cc&lang=en_US&search_scope=everything&adaptor=primo_central_multiple_fe&tab=default_tab&query=any,contains,west%20side%20story,AND&query=any,contains,racism,AND&sortby=rank&mode=advanced&offset=0 . While not focused on racism, the article mentions heavily the way hispanic women are stereotyped in Hollywood and on Broadway. However, I need to further research the relations between white, “successful” Americans and Hispanic/Puerto Rican immigrants.
Five significants from 1957 are-
•I Love Lucy airs it’s final episode. (Significant because it, unlike most shows, featured a male lead born in Cuba.)
•”Little Rock Nine”– First black children integrate formerly white schools.
•President Eisenhower approved the Civil Rights Act
•Baby Boomers became a thing as war vets returned home (birth of American Dream?)
I have analyzed the following three scenes-
“America” (of course.)
The “rumble” & Tony’s death
The one in which the Puerto Ricans call the Jets Polocks, and themselves Spics.
I will need to do further research to back up my interpretation of WSS’s racial division.