Vento 1

Alex Vento

Klimas

English 10 H- Pre-AP

02 October 2017

Plum Plum Pickers

Raymond Barrio’s excerpt from Plum Plum Pickers depicts the life of a migrant worker

struggling to maintain his humanity. Barrio’s use of visual imagery, short/choppy syntax, and

triumphant tone creates a moment of epiphany in one man’s life.

Raymond Barrio’s imagery is portrayed in the Plum Plum Pickers as vivid imagery. In

the beginning, Barrio states “The hot dry air sucking every drop of living moisture from his brute

body” (Barrio). This imagery impacts the story because it illustrates the weather the farm

workers had to work in. The workers had to go through many hardships while picking plums.

The diction in this quote is what helps build the imagery. Phrases like “hot dry”, “living

moisture”, and “brute body” creates a sense of putting oneself in another's shoes. Long,

descriptive sentences that are used to supply this imagery, can also be short.

Although the passage has many long sentences, there are more choppy sentences in the

beginning and middles of the text. This proves the syntax is simple sentences. Barrio displays

this in the passage when he described “Then up again. The trees. The branches. The briarly

branches” (Barrio). This type of syntax is slow, boring, and drags on. It repeats the word

“branches”, which depicts how Manuel feels after repeatedly going up and down the branches

picking fruit. The motion of going up and down the branches represents how the migrant work
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continuously repeated that motion which made them exhausted. Also, “the” is repeated which is

an example of anaphora. Using imagery and syntax helps create the overall tone of the passage.

Eventually, Manuel gained power over Morales, the cruel boss. This was a moment of

triumph which proves the tone to be triumphant. Barrio mentioned, “Manuel felt a thrill of power

course through his nerves” (Barrio), since no one has stood up to Morales. Manuel’s act was

unusual to the workers that someone talked back to him, taking weight off the rest of the workers

shoulders and made them feel relieved. For Manuel, he felt a new feeling. He now knows he and

the other workers are worth the argument against Morales. They aren’t animals and they should

never feel like mistreated slaves.

Barrio makes it clear the use of visual imagery, simple syntax, and triumphal tone creates

a moment of epiphany in one man’s life. These elements show the truth of what a real passage

needs for the words to be understood and relatable.