Abstract

 

My topic is”Gated communities in T.C.Boyle´s novel “The Tortilla Curtain”.

The research paper is covering the problem of illegal Mexican immigrants in the United States as well as the idea of gated communities in the USA to protect the citizens from immigrants all this with a regard to the novel.

When I started my research I thought I would find out about illegal Mexicans having no other choice than to go to America, Mexican immigrants sick of the live in America ,which is full of prejudices and aversion among them, and citizens of America which are not able to connect their lifestyle and work with these immigrants.

These thoughts came to mind because of the history of the south of America and the prejudices which are shown against other immigrant groups in America.

After reading and analysing the novel I searched for a lot of stuff on my topic in the internet. While I filtrated the rare information I gathered a quite good overview about my topic and I was able to understand the novel even better.

After all I can say that primarily in safetyzone communities any person passing by who is not a member of the community is regarded as a potential threat. A fair and objective treatment of non-members can therefore not be guaranteed. In the least gated communities can easily cause a lack of tolerance towards people who are not part of the community.

So far it is a though live being a Mexican immigrant coping with a guerilla drug war in Mexico and a lot of aversion and prejudices against you in America.

Anyway since 1970 the amount of Mexican in America got a seventeen-fold increase.

It was surprisingly for me to notice that the immigrants more likely to be part of the labour force, where they are more likely to work in lower-skillded jobs.

After all it is evidently that my hypothesis completely matches with my results but by working on my research paper I found out even more about the history of gated communities, illegal Mexican immigrants and how the citizens of America are coping with them.