Challenges for the Immigrants Coming To America in the 19th Century

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Challenges for the Immigrants Coming To America in the 19th Century
Introduction
Published in the year 1918, My Antonia is one of the masterpieces that Willa Cather brought to the readers with a twist of personal life story in a rather interesting creation. It is a novel that underlines the plight of the immigrants and their struggles, as they try to get assimilated in the new society. This is a novel that gave Cather her ticket to join the rest of the greatest female writers of her time. Mainly, the recognition came from the fact that most of the immigrants identified with the struggles, while the rest of the population wanted to know more about the historical struggles of the immigrants, with a narrative twist of the accounts. There are quite a number of elements that are dominant in the novel and among the mains ones are the language barriers and the deplorable conditions that the immigrants had to endure. This paper addresses some of the main aspects of language barriers and living conditions experienced by immigrants.
My Antonia
The novel takes the form of a memoir, in which Jim Burden, the narrator in the story, writes about a girl he met once, when he moved to Nebraska at the age of ten. Jim was requested by his friend to write about the bohemian girl they had both known when they were kids (Cather, vii). The request was in light of the fact that his friend did not know the girl as well as Jim. He had been orphaned and was moving to Nebraska to go and live with his grandparents. On the ride to his grandparents’ home in Nebraska, he meets with a bohemian family that is moving in to the country from bohemia. They later on also happen to be neighbors to the grandparents. In the novel the family of the immigrants is called the Shimerdas and their struggles depict experiences by most of the immigrants.
The first incidence where the language barrier elements come up is when the conductor is talking to a group in which Jim is seated, telling them about a family from bohemia. According to the conductor, the family came from across the water and they had a problem communicating in English.
Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from across the water" whose destination was the same as ours."They can't any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she can say is "We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.' She's not much olderthan you, twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she's as bright as a new dollar. Don't you want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She's got the pretty brown eyes, too!" (Cather, 6)
The bohemian family had first bought land on which they were to settle.They had bought land from Peter Krajiek one of the countrymen, for which they had been charged more than the land was worth (Cather, 17). The land deal had been organized by one of their cousins, while the interpreter at the time was Peter Krajiek. Since they did not have much knowledge of the language, Krajiek took advantage of the situation and sold them land at higher price. They would not have understood that they have been duped. At the same time, they did not have the language skills to negotiate for a better deal. As such, their language barrier cost them...