I Want To Buy A Vowel

What is the American dream? For everyone, it is different. The old lady walking

across the street may dream of getting a new house. The rich man with a big house might

dream that he will five a true love. For the Chinese child at school, maybe it is just to fit

in with society. There are many things holding people back from their dreams, such as

family, age, or culture, their general lifestyle. This story is about an immigrant looking to

achieve his dream, but is held back for many reasons. Also, a white man looking to

terrorize a town has the dream of being powerful. In his novel, I Want to Buy a Vowel,

John Welter demonstrates that the road to the American dream is paved differently for

people due to ethnicity and religion.

The American lifestyle is often stereotyped to be very easy for everyone. The main

character, Alfredo Santayana, is an immigrant from Guatemala that illegally crossed the

border into Texas. He grew up with eighteen brothers and sisters, very poor and illiterate.

"I want to buy a vowel'. [he] said to the first American he met."(1) He is only seventeen

years old and doesn't understand any English. The only English he knows is lines from the

television, from shows like Wheel of Fortune and Ford commercials. He just knows that

on the show, people buy a vowel and end with a lot of money and a new car. The reason

he came to America was because "America is suppose to be the land of opportunity"

(141). Alfredo expects everything to be easy and simple, everyone is welcoming and

everyone can do whatever they like. People in America are just suppose to be rich and

give things away. He arrives in Texas and sees all the cars parked on the street. "It seemed

as if everyone in America was born with a car, as if, on the day they were baptized, the

priest gave them a set of car keys"(3) To Alfredo, everyone has a car, even children that

are too young to drive. This is what he expected to happen to him instantly as he came to

America, to receive a house and a car, and money. He finds an abandoned house in the

woods and decides to live there. There is nothing in it, so he tries to "imagine a happy

family who used to live there - two parents, and maybe three of four children, with nice

furniture and beds and curtains on the windows and good meals cooked every day in the

kitchen." (80). He is very disappointed that it wasn't what had happened to him,

because his dream is to be the stereotypical American. For Kenlow Schindler, a white

man born a citizen of the United States, life is easy and that easiness makes it boring. He

decides to vandalize a barn to spice up his life and become a criminal. He draws a

pentagram on the ground in the barn,and within two days the whole town is paranoid that

Satan is coming. Kenlow, however, doesn't want to get his hands dirty, and puts Vienna

Sausages in the middle of another pentagram to pretend it was a satanic ritual that had

taken place. "That was the value of grocery stores, someone kills the animal and

packages it for you" ( ). He doesn't have to do very much to do to pretend to be a satanist,

he simply goes to the grocery store and buys uncooked meat, and people think it is Satan's

work. Alfredo dreams to have the American lifestyle, and Kenlow dreams of easy power.

The road to earning he American lifestyle isn't easy for Latinos. Eva, a ten year old

girl, finds Alfredo in the abandoned house. She becomes friends with him and brings

him food. They talk to each other, even though neither of them know what the other is

saying, since Eva doesn't speak Spanish either. Eva is still very wise for her years. She

notices from her family and school that "That's how most people were, always ridiculing

anyone who wasn't exactly the same as they were" (27). It really shows something about

the world when a ten year old knows the discrimination of the world. She also realizes

that "the only way the INS wanted foreigners in America was if they made everything so

hard and unhappy that foreigners wouldn't want to be here anymore"(215). Throughout

the book, we see all the discrimination from an young, innocent child's point of view.

The government creates freedoms, but the freedoms only apply to the citizens, so everyone

else is discriminated for being different. Alfredo lives in the abandoned house, but then

a boy from Eva's class finds him and gets him on video. "A TV station in Dallas also used

part of Tommy's video on