Voices on the Run: What the Slave Narratives Can Tell Us about The Immigration Debate

Hadley Ajana

Abstract

This paper compares three accounts of runaway slaves from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with three twentieth and twenty-first century accounts of Spanish speaking immigrants to the United States. The works examined are Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Barbara Kingsolver's Bean Trees; Victor Villasenor's Rain of Gold; and Sonia Nozaria's Enrique's Journey. Examining the rhetorical strategies used in the earlier works by the abolitions and the devices used in the modern writing, the author demonstrates that there are substantial similarities in the anti-slavery movement of the 19th century and the fight for immigrants' rights today. However, the paper concludes that contemporary literature is not likely to have the same impact as the slave narratives on the law.