High School Concert Review Essay

If you’ve ever attended a high school choir concert you will notice the director nicely dressed and ready to direct the choir. You will notice all the kids lined up by parts, some with sweaty hands and other with nervous smiles. If you were to attend a concert at Westland High School today you would have to look closely to notice a girl, standing with the soprano group, smiling proudly not at the crowd but at the lights. Her skin is tan, she is not from the United States, yet she spent most of her life there. That girl is not looking at the lights because there is someone hanging out with the lights, she also did not lose a bet and have to look up there the entire time. That girl is smiling because she is somewhere where she feels safe, and at home. That

girl does not care that she is of a different race than some of the people in her classes. That girl...is me, and here is my story.

I was born in Puebla, Mexico on December twenty-second nineteen-ninety seven. I was to be the oldest of four, but that would not happen until later. Despite being born in Mexico, my parent’s home, I only spent the first four years of my life there. Having few memories of that place makes it practically like a foreign country to me. Nevertheless, the few memories that I was able to keep are stored deeply and securely in my heart. Upon arriving in the United States the first thing to be a major challenge for me was learning and understanding the language. My first day of kindergarten was quite difficult, not many other students spoke Spanish, my teacher did not speak Spanish at all, and because of my ethnicity and the fact that I did not speak English, I was an outsider. Things got better after I changed to another school closer to my house and I met my new bus driver who welcomed me with a warm smile. William Arthur Ward once said “a warm smile is the universal language of kindness,” and I did not know until then the validity of that statement.

After having mastered the language and found friends who also were from Mexico, or had some sort of connection to Mexico, I started to feel more at home.

I no longer felt like some sort of outcast at school. Sadly, the sun does not always shine for long. As I began progressing in school and entered intermediate school, I began to realize what judgmental comments came along with not being “American”. A period of confusion overcame my life when I could not understand why some people cared so much about where I was from. I began to wonder if it was right of me to go to school in a country where I was not born. That is when a friend of mine introduced me to a new subject, music. I had heard about the possibility of joining the school’s choir, band, and orchestra program. I decided to try it out because since young, it had caught my attention. Once there I met people from all kinds of backgrounds, there was a large diversity in the groups and they all only cared about one thing, music. Everyone was there to focus on learning and performing music, not just music from the United States, but music from all over the world. Up until that point I had not ever felt more at home. I had finally found the right place to

be.
Choir helped me ride out of the rest of intermediate school, middle school and well into high school. It was no longer a class, instead it had transformed into a place where I could be myself and do my own thing without having to worry about being judged. I shall never forget the quote on the wall in the choir room, “Nurturing Musicians. Inspiring People.” In this program not only did they nurture the inner musician in all of us, but they also inspire us to be caring and nice people with one another. We became a close knit family and stayed that way throughout the years. Choir helped me gain confidence in who I was and be able to accept who I was, despite other’s opinions.