Legal Alien

Mora begins “Legal Alien” by asserting two dominant aspects of the poetic speaker’s character: being bilingual and bicultural. She makes a stylistic choice to intentionally separate the prefix from these words, writing them as “Bi-lingual” and “Bi-cultural” (Line 1), both beginning with capital a letter. This choice highlights the importance of the duality within the speaker, who traverses two different spheres of culture and language. The hyphen acts as a visual representation of being split in two—a feeling with which the speaker wrestles throughout the poem (and indeed, throughout their life).

The following two lines demonstrate the speaker’s ease of switching back and forth between the languages of their two cultures. In English, they ask, “How’s life?” instead of the standard “How are you doing?” (Line 2) In Spanish, they state, “Me’stan volviendo loca” (“They are driving me crazy”) rather than the more formal “Me están volviendo loca” (Line 3). Both quotations use colloquial language, demosntrating the speaker’s proficiency in speaking in either language.

However, the lines also contrast each other. “How’s life?” is a form of small talk that stays on the surface of polite emotion with English speakers, whereas the line in Spanish is much more revealing of the speaker’s complex internal state.