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When living in the same place for a long time, the people and the surrounding culture gives you an identity. This identity molds you, influences you, and grows with you. When you move from your originating identity, there is always the fear of losing oneself. A person’s identity is what makes you, you. Granted, identities can and most likely will evolve and change with you. In Alfredo Veá, Jr.’s novel La Maravilla, we see the identities of three very different people and how those identities help shape the fourth person who is on a path of self-reflection. Along the way there are other cultural influences of Buckeye Road’s inhabitants and how those cultures help the main protagonist. Buckeye Road, the setting of Veá’s 1950’s novel, is the home to many displaced persons, struggling to find themselves in a town unmapped by Arizona. “Buckeye Road was not Phoenix, nor even a part of Phoenix, not a suburb or an outskirt…There were no street names or street signs, no …show more content…
“We are a people o gaps, mijo” (Veá 221) Manuel explains as he sips on peyote with his grandson. While on peyote, Beto experiences flight as a hawk and meeting his great-grandfather and Manuel as a child. Beto asks young Manuel if the reappearance of Apache and Josephina’s belief that it means he will die soon is true. “She’s not wrong. You should know that. She’s not wrong in that way. When the singing tree spoke to us so long ago, it told us that death is the gift we must give in thanks for the bounty the world gives us” (Veá 227). Before Beto leaves his hallucination, young Manuel makes him promise to bury the chapayeka mask with him. The chapayeka mask is another Yaqui tradition, symbolizing sexual energy and playfulness. It is custom to bury it with the shaman, the priest who could diving events and like Josephina, Manuel has that
Have you ever disobeyed your families culture? Or ever wanted to forget about something in your past culture? It’s not always easy, to follow traditions, sometimes you want to create or change your lifestyle.In the poem ‘’El Olvido’’ by Judith Ortiz Cofer and ‘’Life In The Age Of The Mimis’’ by Domingo Martinez. The authors of these texts indicate the idea that trying to hide your cultures identity is defiance against your heritage.
The concept of culture spurs many individuals to study, understand, and obtain knowledge of certain customs, values, standards, and rituals that create another perspective to empathetically grasp, and each relatable truth, discovered by its researcher, can establish foundational, inalienable traits to argument the researcher’s identity. Each human is elected to be a researcher of culture with or without the knowledge of the research, but ironically, identity is not a firm state of being; it is continually shaped and molded after each new experience. The Amish society is not the exception from the foundational consistencies of culture and identity, and furthermore, this society, akin to other cultural entities, has created an interesting form of identity exploration from a rite of passage known as Rumspringa. Consequently, Rumspringa relies on thin layers of accountability with many standards, which inevitably, induces negative consequences to an adolescent’s search for personal identity affirmations.
In Sherman Alexie’s “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” and “Dead Men’s Path”, the reader is given a glimpse into two different stories but share many similar characteristics of traditions. Tradition is the handing down of statements, beliefs, legends, customs, information and cultures within a group of people from generation to generation. However, these two stories will reveal that the protagonists in these stories, Michael from “Dead Men’s Path” and Victor from “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” will ignore their own traditions that they face throughout the story. In other words, the protagonists are westernized and have forgotten their own culture, which reflects the theory of the melting pot. The ignorance of ancestry and traditions brings the worst fates into the lives of the protagonists in each story.
Our lives are defined by our experiences of growing up and of who people are when people are developing. Both, in their respective regards, are something that can be difficult to alter to the individual. Gender, race, classes, and other building blocks of our identity are always shifting to who anyone is and while a person can’t affect themselves, society can, and often does change their perspective towards their own identity and how they interact with the stimulation outside of their psyche.
In order to better understand the different kinds of identity or how it is modified over time, it is important to analyze some texts. “The Myth of the Latin Woman” by Cofer and the two episodes of In treatment Season One, Week one: “Alex” and “Sophie” are going to provide a base to discuss identity problems or diffusions in this essay. When the characters are deeply analyzed, readers will notice how various social frameworks have influenced them. Culture, education and interaction with different social groups are factors that induce the formation of these people’s personalities. All these characters are seen from different per...
...oss, but specifically in cases where the protagonists are unaware or do not desire loss of individual identity and cases where the protagonists purposefully choose to conceal individual identity by using disguises. In the progression of both stories, the former is seen less often while the latter becomes more common as both characters gradually become more aware of the differences between their individual identities and the collective identities of their surroundings along with greater authorial portrayal of the rigidity of society through necessary conformation to one collective identity. Throughout the two works, the two authors extend the concept of home beyond the conventional portrayal as merely a physical structure by giving it significance as a state where the uniqueness of individual identity can be freely expressed.
Erika Lopez’s Flaming Iguanas addresses various constitutions of American identity, including ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The protagonist, Jolene, is illustrative of how these constitutions of identity are complicated as she travels west. In particular, traveling westward typically consists of white men who reject the constraints of middle class life and decide to get on the road in hopes of finding selfhood. Flaming Iguanas demonstrates that gender, class, and ethnicity tie into the ability or inability to finding one’s self of self. Therefore, Jolene is unable to find her true sense of self because she is a woman. Lopez directs her readers’ attention to situations in her protagonist’s life where her mixed ethnicity, and ambivalent
What is identity? Identity is an unbound formation which is created by racial construction and gender construction within an individual’s society even though it is often seen as a controlled piece of oneself. In Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum’s piece, “The Complexity of Identity: ‘Who Am I?’, Tatum asserts that identity is formed by “individual characteristics, family dynamics, historical factors, and social and political contexts” (Tatum 105). Tatum’s piece, “The Complexity of Identity: ‘Who Am I?’” creates a better understanding of how major obstacles such as racism and sexism shape our self identity.
What is personal identity? This question has been asked and debated by philosophers for centuries. The problem of personal identity is determining what conditions and qualities are necessary and sufficient for a person to exist as the same being at one time as another. Some think personal identity is physical, taking a materialistic perspective believing that bodily continuity or physicality is what makes a person a person with the view that even mental things are caused by some kind of physical occurrence. Others take a more idealist approach with the belief that mental continuity is the sole factor in establishing personal identity holding that physical things are just reflections of the mind. One more perspective on personal identity and the one I will attempt to explain and defend in this paper is that personal identity requires both physical and psychological continuity; my argument is as follows:
Identity is a state of mind in which someone recognizes/identifies their character traits that leads to finding out who they are and what they do and not that of someone else. In other words it's basically who you are and what you define yourself as being. The theme of identity is often expressed in books/novels or basically any other piece of literature so that the reader can intrigue themselves and relate to the characters and their emotions. It's useful in helping readers understand that a person's state of mind is full of arduous thoughts about who they are and what they want to be. People can try to modify their identity as much as they want but that can never change. The theme of identity is a very strenuous topic to understand but yet very interesting if understood. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez and Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki are two remarkable books that depict the identity theme. They both have to deal with people that have an identity that they've tried to alter in order to become more at ease in the society they belong to. The families in these books are from a certain country from which they're forced to immigrate into the United States due to certain circumstances. This causes young people in the family trauma and they must try to sometimes change in order to maintain a comfortable life. Both authors: Alvarez and Houston have written their novels Is such an exemplifying matter that identity can be clearly depicted within characters as a way in adjusting to their new lives.
Has anyone ever just needed something to hide from the world and not act their true self for a while? This is called an identity mask and it is the central idea for the two articles, “The Necklace” by Guy De Maupassant and “Online Identity” by Common Lit Staff develop the common central idea that people are often ashamed by who they are so they try to hide behind a fake identity. Although both these are about identity masks, they both are using masks to hide one’s true self but in different situations and they also cover how the different long-term affects differ and this essay compares and contrasts both points. These two articles are about how someone wants to cover up who they truly are in order to appear better to other people but have very different examples of the long-term effect of how using a mask affects people.
There are two papers to be investigated in this essay which deals with the (re)construction of identities due to linguistic practices and spatial movements across boundaries. The first paper is a research done by De Fina (2013) who focused on the investigation of top-down and bottom-up strategies manifested in the construction of identities of participants taking part in an interaction. In her introduction, she highlighted that these identities are constantly negotiated when one interacts with one’s surroundings. It was pointed out that traditional forms and ideas on identity construction and analysis has undergone massive changes due to the pervasive nature of modern technology and ease of mobility which defies the rather stationary nature of human beings in the past. Needless to say, interactions that shape and frame identities now occur more constantly and are less predictable than it had been previously. In addition, De Fina differentiated between top-down and bottom-up strategies in identity construction. The former is performed by those who are observers of a particular interaction, or outsiders looking into a conversation while the latter is carried out by the participants in the interactions in question, or the interlocutors of a communicative act. The interactions investigated were extracted from ‘the Spanish radio station El Zol…broadcasting in the greater Washington-Baltimore area’ (De Fina, 2013, p. 556).
Zora Neal Hurston’s book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, reveals one of life’s most relevant purposes that stretches across cultures and relates to every aspect of enlightenment. The novel examines the life of the strong-willed Janie Crawford, as she goes down the path of self-discovery by way of her past relationships. Ideas regarding the path of liberation date all the way back to the teachings of Siddhartha. Yet, its concept is still recycled in the twenty-first century, as it inspires all humanity to look beyond the “horizon,” as Janie explains. Self-identification, or self-fulfillment, is a theme that persists throughout the book, remaining a quest for Janie Crawford to discover, from the time she begins to tell the story to her best friend, Pheoby Watson. Hurston makes a point at the beginning of the novel to separate the male and female identities from one another. This is important for the reader to note. The theme for identity, as it relates to Janie, carefully unfolds as the story goes on to expand the depths of the female interior.
The fifth stage, according to Erik Erikson psychoanalytic theory of development is the Identity Vs Identity confusion. The stage occurs during adolescence in the ages between 12 to 18 years. At this stage, the adolescents try to find a sense of personal and self-identity by intensely exploring their personal goals, beliefs, and values (McLeod, 2017). Notably, the adolescence is between childhood and adulthood. Thus, their mind is between the morality learned during childhood and the ethics they are trying to develop into adulthood. The transitioning from childhood to adulthood is the most important development for a person because the individual is becoming independent and is focusing on the future regarding career, relationships, families
Social processes are those in which we interact with people and all the ways in which we interact with our environment, while introspective processes are those in which we use cognitive thought to assess ourselves. Identity formation is the development of the distinct personality of a person regarded as their continuous or known personality which is reached at at particular stage in life, when these individual characteristics are reached a person is thought to be known or have formed their full identity. Distinct aspects of the person's identity include a sense of continuity, a sense of uniqueness from others, and a sense of affiliation. Identity formation regards both the creation of a person’s personal identity and the identity they hold as part of certain groups such as friends, family and colleagues. Identity is usually considered to be finite and consisting of separate and distinct parts (family, cultural, personal, professional, etc.), although according to Parker J. Palmer, it is a continuously evolving part of our being in which our genetics ,culture, family, friends, those who have harmed us and vice versa, our actions, experiences, and choices made, come together to form who we are at a certain moment in time.