In Mary Louise Pratt’s essay, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” she writes about the impacts of contact zones, communities, and the power of language. In her own words, contact zones are “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other within asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt 319). Pratt insists that contact zones are surrounding us in educational environments, social meetings, family settings, etc. affecting how we interact with one another. Readers of a contact zone should be prepared to read differently because contact zones are hostile places where people are forced to take drastic actions. Readers should focus on reading with respect, empathy, and acceptance towards the person engaged in the contact zone. A reaction to a contact zone is what Pratt calls an autoethnography. An autoethnography in Pratt’s words is a type of writing, “in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them” (Pratt 319). Pratt’s story teaches us an important lesson on accepting others’ beliefs and cultural values even if they are different from our own. Pratt’s essay shows readers that cultural boundaries can and should be broken. Pratt opens with a memory of her son, Sam who collects and trades baseball cards. She writes about how a simple hobby gave her son the opportunity to learn life lessons. Sam learned phonics, geographical information, arithmetic skills, fairness, trust, and the power of money through his baseball cards. Pratt states, “I watched Sam apply his arithmetic skills to working out batting averages and subtracting retirement years from rookie years” (Pratt 317). She found joy in the fact that school gave Sam the foundation to prosper in these areas. Pratt also expresses her dissatisfaction with the schooling system. She reveals, “I found it unforgivable that schooling itself gave him nothing remotely as meaningful to do, let alone anything that would actually take him beyond the referential, masculinist ethos of baseball and its lore” (Pratt 318). Although she is happy her son is using the skills he has learned in school to prosper in his hobby, there are negative effects of being a part of the baseball community. It is problematic because baseball is a world highly characterized by the views of men which are not suited for a young impressionable boy like Sam. The essence of Pratt’s frustration is that her son’s education in school is a grain of sand compared to the knowledge he gained from his baseball cards and the environment that went along with them. Sam acquired skills and information from his hobby that would serve him far more than what he “learned” in school. Pratt uses her son’s story as an anecdote to illustrate contact zones. Richard Rodriguez’s essay, “Achievement of Desire,” is a recollection of the difficulties of balancing life as a thriving student and the life in a working/immigrant Mexican family. He prospered in academics from an early age. This aspect of his life made him an outsider both at home and in school. Throughout his essay, Rodriguez refers to himself as a “scholarship boy” which is a reference from Richard Hoggart’s book, The Uses of Literacy. The scholarship boy is a friction point between two worlds, just as Rodriguez is. Throughout his life, he experiences many different types of contact zones, transculturation, assimilation, and imagined communities. In her essay, Mary Louise Pratt uses Guaman Poma’s text, The First New Chronicle and Good Government (New Chronicle) to illustrate a