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71 pages 2 hours read

Mawi Asgedom

Of Beetles and Angels: A Boy’s Remarkable Journey from a Refugee Camp to Harvard

Mawi AsgedomNonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 2001

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Paired Texts & Other Resources

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Recommended Texts for Pairing

How Immigrants Make America Great

  • a TEDx Talk from July 2016 by Mawi Asgedom, in which he makes the case that immigrants in the US make America a safer, better country
  • Playing on former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan (“Make America Great”), Mawi discusses the anti-immigration rhetoric that characterizes Trump’s campaign for the presidency.
  • Mawi talks about his life’s experience as a refugee from Ethiopia, drawing on themes from the book like Power in Education and Tradition and Appearances as Deceiving. He makes the case that the immigrant experience is a benefit, not a hindrance, to America as a country.

Immigrants in Our Own Land

  • a poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca from a collection by the same name which Baca wrote while incarcerated in a state prison in New Mexico
  • The poem is a sustained analogy that compares prisoners to immigrants leaving their life behind and entering a new “country” (prison).
  • The poem sheds light on both kinds of experiences.
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