Cultural Identity: A Personal Journey of Language and Perception

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Being a part of something is all a part of cultural identity. A big cultural identity, or way to describe yourself is race and language. I am Mexican and Salvadoran, I wasn’t born in Mexico, but I lived there till I was six years old. Since I lived there for some of my early childhood, Spanish was my first language. Not many know this, but because of that, learning English was pretty hard for me, not just that but with being Mexican people think I'm unintelligent and don't care about school, or other things such as my future. These are some struggles that I face in my cultural identity. Before coming to the United States for school, my mom knew I had to learn English, but she didn’t get around to it as much. I started learning English around …show more content…

If I know what I’m exactly talking about, I won’t struggle to explain it, but when I do struggle and don’t know how to say something in English, then I have to say it in Spanish. This can be hard for me sometimes, depending on who it is I’m talking to because then they would have to know Spanish to understand me. Sometimes when this happens, I sort of feel insecure because I then think that they’re secretly judging me and thinking I'm dumb for not knowing how to say stuff in English. This mainly happens when I'm talking to someone that's not the same as me, meaning in race. Talking to someone, especially in school, can be hard because not many of the people I talk to speak Spanish, and also not many of them are the same as me. Thus, I then think people judge me just because of my race. The only reason for my way of thinking this is because I've heard things said before to me, and about me in school and out of school. This is a struggle towards the way I think of my cultural identity in terms of race because then it makes me feel insecure about who I

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