My interviewee is classified as a second-generation female immigrant, meaning that she is a US born child with immigrant parents (Feliciano, 01/04/16). To keep her identity confidential, I will use a pseudonym for my respondent; in this essay, she will be referred to as Monica. This paper will discuss and analyze Monica’ struggles with language, her experience of assimilation, what drives her educational success, and how does she see herself in terms of identity. Monica’s parents immigrated illegally to the United States in the 1990s. After having Monica in California, they went back to Mexico, so the family could meet her. Her family resided in Guerrero, Mexico until her father lost his job and he was obligated to immigrate to the United …show more content…
Throughout her education, her parents have always supported her. Unlike the Filipina American youth, in the article, “We Don’t’ Sleep Around Like White Girls Do,” who have limited freedom and higher expectations, Monica tells me that she is so grateful for her parents because they give her the freedom to do whatever she wants. She wants to do immigration law, not because her parents persuaded her, in fact, they tell her that if that is not what she want to do, then she should not do it. Her parents also approved for her to attend University of California, Irvine. Since she has lived in a little town almost all her life, she wanted to go far, explore, and experience a different environment, and UCI happened to be the farthest college from her home. Monica highlights that she wants to get her parents out their current situation. She pursues a higher education to receive a degree because that is the only thing she can do to help her parents. Monica’s parents are field workers. When I asked her why did she think she went as far as she did in school, she responds, “I always saw the struggle with my parents…I know what is like to live in Mexico…the hardships of coming here and the sacrifices my parents did for me.” Even though Monica was little when she lived in Mexico, she noticed the economic hardships her family has faced. Therefore, she feels the responsibility to pursue a higher education and provide her parents a better life. Monica demonstrates an example of a dual frame of reference because her motivation to improve is due to her experiences living in Mexico. When I asked her, if she ever wanted to go back to Mexico, she replied, “I would do it but to do something for the community…it bothers me how here [we are constantly upgrading] and you go over there and everything is the same.” According to Professor Feliciano, the concept of dual frame of reference is based on the individual’s
Part Three of the book “Just Like Us” written by Helen Thorpe is comprised of illegal undocumented individuals residing in Denver Colorado. The individuals consist of a group of four Mexican young adults all with the dream of one day attending college and finally obtaining a legal status within the United States. In this portion of the readings, Yadira, Marisela, Clara, and Elissa are entering their senior year at their University and have defined the odds of successfully completing college while maintaining an illegal status. Helen Thorpe clearly demonstrates a passion in tracking individuals that are determined to become legal citizens within society; however, lack the proper advocacy and documentation to do so. Part Three of the book envelops the complexity of maintaining a legal status among society members through the lives of these four influential young ladies striving to achieve higher education in the
In Subtractive Schooling: US-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring, Angela Valenzuela investigates immigrant and Mexican American experiences in education. Valenzuela mentions differences in high schools between U.S born youth and immigrants such as how immigrants she interviewed seemed to achieve in school as they feel privileged to achieve secondary education. However, she found that her study provided evidence of student failure due to schools subtracting resources from these youths. Both are plagued by stereotypes of lacking intellectual and linguistic traits along with the fear of losing their culture. As a Mexican American with many family members who immigrated to the U.S to pursue a higher education, I have experience with Valenzuela’s
This book was published in 1981 with an immense elaboration of media hype. This is a story of a young Mexican American who felt disgusted of being pointed out as a minority and was unhappy with affirmative action programs although he had gained advantages from them. He acknowledged the gap that was created between him and his parents as the penalty immigrants ought to pay to develop and grow into American culture. And he confessed that he got bewildered to see other Hispanic teachers and students determined to preserve their ethnicity and traditions by asking for such issues to be dealt with as departments of Chicano studies and minority literature classes. A lot of critics criticized him as a defector of his heritage, but there are a few who believed him to be a sober vote in opposition to the political intemperance of the 1960s and 1970s.
The authors mention Miguel Fernandez, a fresh graduate from a small high school who has had struggles that have affected his opportunities to go off to college. These struggles include financial hardships and also that Miguel “was undocumented and in the country illegally” (Noguera and Kundu par.8). Though Miguel
In Lives in Limbo, Roberto G. Gonzales dissects the disastrous effects of US immigration policy on young Latina/os struggling in the often untouched, unnoticed, uncared for, American underbelly. Through a striking ethnography, Gonzalez examines 150 illuminating case-studies of young undocumented Latina/os, shedding light on their shared experience in the struggle for legitimacy in the United States - their lives, effectively, in limbo. He develops two major groups with which to classify the struggling youth: the college-goers, like Cesar, who received strong marks in high school and was able to land himself a spot within the UC system, and the early-exiters, like Silvia, who was unable to attend college, resigned to a paranoid life plagued
Even if these students have achieved the highest honors and have the brains of an engineer, they aren’t able to reach their greatest potential because they simply do not have documents. Those who are undocumented are doomed to working backbreaking jobs that pay substantially below minimum wage. Spare Parts has challenged and shown me that it takes an immigrant double, or even triple the amount of toil to achieve anything in life. These boys endeavoured through adversities that many of us will never encounter. Luis luckily had a green card, but Lorenzo, Oscar, and Cristian were all living under the fear of deportation. They all wanted more after graduating from Carl Hayden but their dreams quickly vanished because the reality was that they’re illegal immigrants. When we hear the word “immigration”, we automatically think “illegal”, but what we don’t see is that these illegal immigrants are trying to reach their own American Dreams by coming to America. As the author includes Patrick J. Buchanan’s perspective on immigrants, “...families came to the United States to leech off government services.” (35), it shows us how immigrants are perceived.
The goal of this research is to find out why the immigrant students have to face more challenges in the level of education they achieve, the high level poverty that they face in their daily lives and all the confusing networks they have around them which they have no clue of how to utilize it. Also, the research focusses on the fewer resources immigrant students have while achieving their goals. The research question is important as it does affect all immigrant students and their respective families and not limited just to the immigrant. I am sure many families move to a different country to achieve better education and to make a brighter future for themselves and their loved ones. These families come with so much hope and faith, but in return they are bombarded with so much confusing information that it’s very easy for them to get lost and give up. At last, children are the future and if from being they don’t have the correct resources then how will they achieve their goals.
For more than 300 years, immigrants from every corner of the globe have settled in America, creating the most diverse and heterogeneous nation on Earth. Though immigrants have given much to the country, their process of changing from their homeland to the new land has never been easy. To immigrate does not only mean to come and live in a country after leaving your own country, but it also means to deal with many new and unfamiliar situations, social backgrounds, cultures, and mainly with the acquisition and master of a new language. This often causes mixed emotions, frustration, awkward feelings, and other conflicts. In Richard Rodriguez’s essay “Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood”, the author describes the social, cultural and linguistic difficulties encountered in America as he attempts to assimilate to the American culture. Richard Rodriguez by committing himself to speaking English, he lost his cultural ties, family background and ethnic heritage.
Although our society is slowly developing a more accepting attitude toward differences, several minority groups continue to suffer from cultural oppression. In her essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Gloria Anzaldúa explores the challenges encountered by these groups. She especially focuses on her people, the Chicanos, and describes the difficulties she faced because of her cultural background. She argues that for many years, the dominant American culture has silenced their language. By forcing them to speak English and attempting to get rid of their accents, the Americans have robbed the Chicanos of their identity. She also addresses the issue of low self-esteem that arises from this process of acculturation. Growing up in the United States,
Both my interviewee and I identify as working class, biracial, and first-generation women. Subsequently, seeing our families struggle through dire financial situations, motivated us to get an education. We understand how difficult it must have been for our them to venture to a new land and face language barriers that prevented them from working in a well-paying career. My interviewee and I understand that we hold systemic privilege by being citizens of the United States and fluent English speakers, a feature our families did not have. Thus, we both believe that pursuing higher education will provide us with stability and the best future for ourselves and our
The immigrant’s journey to America, as depicted throughout history, transports culture, language, beliefs and unique lifestyles from one land to the other, but also requires one to undergo an adaptation process. The children of these immigrants, who are usually American-born, experience the complexity of a bicultural life, even without completely connecting to the two worlds to which they belong. Potentially resulting is the internal desire to claim a singular rather than dual identity, for simplicity, pride and a sense of acceptance. Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian-American author and writer of “My Two Lives” could never classify herself as.
In the essay "It’s Hard Enough Being Me," Anna Lisa Raya relates her experiences as a multicultural American at Columbia University in New York and the confusion she felt about her identity. She grew up in L.A. and mostly identified with her Mexican background, but occasionally with her Puerto Rican background as well. Upon arriving to New York however, she discovered that to everyone else, she was considered "Latina." She points out that a typical "Latina" must salsa dance, know Mexican history, and most importantly, speak Spanish. Raya argues that she doesn’t know any of these things, so how could this label apply to her? She’s caught between being a "sell-out" to her heritage, and at the same time a "spic" to Americans. She adds that trying to cope with college life and the confusion of searching for an identity is a burden. Anna Raya closes her essay by presenting a piece of advice she was given on how to deal with her identity. She was told that she should try to satisfy herself and not worry about other people’s opinions. Anna Lisa Raya’s essay is an informative account of life for a multicultural American as well as an important insight into how people of multicultural backgrounds handle the labels that are placed upon them, and the confusion it leads to in the attempt to find an identity. Searching for an identity in a society that seeks to place a label on each individual is a difficult task, especially for people of multicultural ancestry.
Albeit the politics of immigration target cultures of the highest population at a given time, these laws and politics can often affect immigrants of other cultures in a different way virtually having an inversion positive result. The lives of the immigrant Latina women seeking opportunity and education in California compared to the immigrant Iranian women seeking liberation from traditional oppressive life of Iran proves an impeccable example of this. The politics on the immigration of Latina women have i...
Immigrants have morphed American culture and cultural identity by bringing diversity and teaching us what it means to be American. In Richard Rodriguez’s essay titled “Blaxicans’ and Other Reinvented Americans” the author converses about American culture and cultural identity. Rodriguez proclaims that using race as a basis for identification is completely fallacious. The author also conversates about the recognition of assimilation similar to “Op-Ed: American identity crisis? What’s an ‘American’ identity” by Paul Wallis. Wallis discourses about assimilation, his definition of an ‘American’, by giving examples of races mixing to create a culture.
John Bodnar says it well when he suggests that "the center of everyday life was to be found in the family-household. It was here that past values and present realities were reconciled, examined on an intelligible scale, evaluated and mediated." This assertion implies that the immigrant family-household is the vehicle of assimilation. I will take this assertion a step further and examine more specifically the powerful role of the patriarchal father within Anzia Yezierska's book Bread Givers and Barry Levinson's film Avalon. Yezierska's theme vividly depicts the constraint of a patriarchal world, while Levinson illustrates the process of assimilation and the immigrant, now American, family and its decline. In this paper, I will exemplify how the patriarchal father, Sam Kochinsky (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and Reb Smolinsky are the key determinant of the dynamics by which the family assimilates.