Another One Bites The Dust :: essays research papers

Another One Bites the â€Å"Dust† Sweet Diamond Dust, written by Rosario Ferre, focuses on modernization and how it’s impacted the country of Puerto Rico and it’s people. This book discusses the struggles and hardships of managing sugar mills and the influential changes the Americans brought to Puerto Rico in the early 1900’s. The Americans triumph over the local landowners and their sugar mills, was not all from their own doings. Their successes is in part of the town’s own greed. Through manipulation, persuasion, and cunnings, Diamond Dust was able to survive through the toughest of hardships, and still manage to be the only competitor (in Puerto Rico) to the northerners. With Diamond Dust’s success also came a price, and with the very same methods that brought the mill to its climax, also made it fall to its knees, through greed. In the beginning there was much talk of how proud the people of Puerto Rico were of their country, â€Å"Built on the gently rolling slopes that descend form Mount Guamani, it looks upon a savannah of fabulously fertile loam, whose sabled, furrowed topsoil is considered to be one of the richest in the world.† (3-4) But as the book progresses, it begins to reveal its true side. The town of Guamani was not as peaceful and giving as it is told to be. The writer tends to discuss how the Americans arrival has changed the town for the worse. â€Å" Far from being a paradise, Guamani has become a hell, a monstrous whirlpool from which the terrifying funnel of Snow White Sugar Mills spews out sugar night and day toward the north.† (7) Many Puerto Ricans of lower stature or less well of than the rich, truly believed the northerners were saviors who helped modernize a town in need of relief:  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   All this was done away with when the foreigners came: they established modern methods of reaping and planting; the field hands were treated like human beings instead of like slaves; their children could go to school; they were given adequate housing and shoes†¦ In other words, the northerners were a blessing to the poor and to the middle class as well, albeit to the rich. (68) Diamond Dust faced many hardships that could have easily wiped it out of business, but thanks to the devotion and patience spent managing the land, it overcame many close turnovers. Between Don