Write one paragraph comparing the memoir and the article. Compare how the writers present similar ideas to the reader. Include e
vidence from the text to support your comparison. By the time my mother married my father, however, she knew all about the true nature of the dictatorship. Thousands had lost their lives in failed attempts to return the country to democracy. Family friends, whom she had assumed had dropped away of their own accord, turned out to have been disappeared. My father had been lucky. As a young man, he had narrowly escaped to Canada after the plot he had participated in as a student failed. This was to be the first of two escapes. That same year, 1937, El Generalísimo ordered the overnight slaughter of some eighteen thousand Haitians, who had come across the border to work on sugarcane plantations for slave wages. It was from my father that my mother learned why Trujillo hated blacks with such a vengeance, how he disguised his own Haitian ancestry, how he lightened his skin with makeup.
–“A Genetics of Justice,”
Julia Alvarez
The method his soldiers used in 1937 to try to identify those who would be killed was cruelly unique. When confronting someone in the lands along the border with Haiti, they would hold up a sprig of parsley and ask what it was. If the person responded by trilling the "r" in perejil (Spanish for parsley), he would be free to go. Anyone who didn't trill the "r" was thought to be a Haitian Creole speaker—and was likely to be killed.
The first author, Julia, describes the facts as anecdotes of her family, while the other author, Mark, reports the events from an unknown source. Both authors write about the culling of Haitians in lands they are clearly not welcome in. Moreover, while Julia states the reason behind the killing of Haitians - having learned from her family its due to the hate the ruler of the land holds against them -, Mark describes in detail the victim identification methods of these people - being the verification of their pronunciation.
