Ashley Alizor

Busy Bones Ashley Alizor

Busy Bones is a fictional short story in a Graphic Novel Form, it addresses the contemporary and long-running controversy over Mexican immigrant workers here in America. The story focuses on the inequalities that are afforded to the workers and their families, and what the system has overlooked; the cycle of poverty and despair that lurks over the lives of these farmer worker's lives. My main focus in writing this story is to illustrate the cycle of poverty across generations as well as the crippling effect of institutional racism. The story is told from the magical realist tradition. As a school of writing, magical realism is a tradition that is ripe with its application of magic and illusion while investigating the very real and authentic power struggle between the rich and the poor that happens every day. The story is meant to prompt my readers to question the meaning of realism in fiction as well as in everyday life. Structured somewhat like a poem, I consider Busy Bones to be one of my favorite prose pieces, adapted from a poem into a Graphic Novel.