A Child Between Two Borders Essay

Growing up in a Hispanic household has shaped and built my values in life. At Appleton North High School, I am one out of the few Hispanic students. Knowing that my parents have migrated to America to give me a better future has motivated me to make it happen. Although, as a Mexican-American, I have felt out of place as a minority. However, with time I learned to accept my cultural differences. In fact, to this day, I thank my widowed father for the sacrifices and greater opportunities he has given me. My goal is to keep representing the few Hispanic students in college by working hard to achieve my career goals; not all Hispanics are fortunate enough to attend college. I also work to inspire young Hispanics to find their potential and follow

Our childhood plays a significant role in defining the kind of person that we become and the type of life that we live.

Children may need to overcome obstacles from their past that impeded their ability to learn and grow.” (How kids develop. (Online) 2008).

Rodriguez mentioned in this article that, “Without question, it would have pleased me to hear my teachers address me in Spanish when I entered the classroom. I would have felt much less afraid. I would have trusted them and responded with ease.” ( pg. 3) He felt out of place due to that he felt forced to conform to what was abnormal to him. Once his parents started to add more english into the interactions with Richard, he began to do better in school. He made more friends and became more social due to the fact he became more comfortable with the fact he could now communicate the same language as the other kids around him. Rodrigues mentioned, “ That day I moved very far from the disadvantaged child I had been only days earlier.” (paragraph 33)

Carmen Foster, the subject of this paper, was born in Bogota, Colombia and moved to San Francisco, California when her parents divorced at the age of fifteen. Prior to immigrating, however, both Carmen and her two siblings attended a bilingual British school from the age of five. All subjects

When she was at home or in her hometown she was expected to speak spanish and if she spoke anything else, even if it was a mix of spanish and something else it was seen as wrong and disrespectful in her community. The girls primary Discourse was her spanish identity. She was from mexico and her family as well as her community expected her to act to the expectations of a well-respected Latina woman, and also expected her to speak traditional spanish. But the girl also went to an English speaking school so she was expected to speak standard american English and only that whenever she was at school. “I remember being caught speaking Spanish at recess- that was good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler”(252). So this girl is struggling between her two Discourses because each culture is telling her that it’s either their identity or nothing. So the girl tries to come up with a mix of both and ends up with Chicano which was a mix of the two different languages she was expected to know. But the two cultures still didn’t seem to approve of what she was doing, her spanish culture actually ended up finding is disrespectful they said “ ‘‘cultural traitor, you’re speaking the oppressor’s language,’ I have been accused by various Latinos and Latinas. Chicano Spanish is considered by the purist and by most Latinos deficient, a mutilation of

Growing up in a Hispanic household is a new experience every day. There are many adaptations and cultural norms that are still being taught and passed on, on a daily basis. Cultural adaptation is something that is with us to the day that we die and we apply it to live out our everyday lives. However, the beauty in this is that we are able to change these adaptations based on what we learn every day; based on the different people and different experiences and cultures we encounter. For example, I am Hispanic but I have a friend who is Arabic and some who are White, and we all have different norms.

Migration can bring difficulties to parenting; language barriers may occur in the process (Bornstein and Bohr, 2011, p. 3). Children become more and more disconnected to their parents while they become attached to modern America as a result of peer pressure or solely because of the portrayal set out by the media (i.e. television shows, movies, music and magazines). It’s understandable that children want to fit in and that is something that parents should be more open-minded to. Dissonant acculturation, as explained by Bernstein et al (2011), “leads to increasing parent-child conflicts in immigrant families and adaptation challenges for children” (p. 3); children learning English and the ways of their new country can cause them to lose sight of their native culture and language (p. 3). I have often heard parents express their desire to ensure Spanish is learned and used so that it is not lost as well as how much more it is important for them to learn Spanish than English. Migration, overall, “affects intergenerational relations in the family” (Foner, n.d., p.

Adolescence is a period of dramatic and revolutionary change. In western cultures it is the time of life, either most reviled, depicted as posing the greatest threat to the established order of things, or most celebrated and romanticized, in particular within the sphere of popular culture, for its creative and challenging energies. At its onset, adolescence can be seen as the beginning of the end of childhood and as such is a time of mourning for the loss of the relative dependency and security of childhood, characterized by attempts at recapturing what

Throughout the course of this semester, we discovered the wonders of how the mind and body develop over time. How our brains can grow in knowledge of problem solving skills and how our bodies capabilities decline in older adulthood. In this semester, I focused on one portion of development in particular. I chose to concentrate on late childhood—around ages ten to twelve—because I had no prior knowledge of this age group other than my own personal experiences. My service learning experience with these astute kids opened my eyes to the significance of the body and mind’s ability to expand at such a young age. It is a time of their lives where it is important to be exposed to knew and challenging ideas and problems. Watching them grow throughout the semester was remarkable because it was in a natural setting for them and there was no pressure to act a certain way or change their behavior in the volunteers’ presence.

I come from a place that is heavily influenced by Mexican and American culture mostly due to living in a border town with Mexico. My mother is more in touch with her Mexican culture, while my dad is more influenced by a Tejano/American culture. They both have been great influencers in the person I am today. Growing up in my house all I spoke was Spanish mostly due to my grandmother only knowing that language, I eventually learned English as I entered school. I remember spending my weekends watching shows and movies like ‘El Chavo del Ocho’, ‘La Nina de la Mochila Azul’, and ‘Rebelde’ or listening to the songs my mom put by Mana, Juan Gabriel, and Vicente Fernandez. I took a liking to school from a young age, I found learning fun and friends

However, many Hispanic families were and in some cases, still are viewed as lower-class citizens. According to Barrientos, “To me, speaking Spanish translated into being poor. It meant waiting tables and cleaning hotel rooms. It meant being left off the cheerleading squad and receiving a condescending smile from the guidance counselor when you said you planned on becoming a lawyer or a doctor” (561). They are not respected in a lot of communities, they live dirty, and they have bad jobs. These stereotypes are reasons why Barrientos did not want to be called Mexican and never wanted to learn Spanish. If diversity had been celebrated when Barrientos was a child, as it is celebrated and honored now, she would have grown up speaking Spanish and being proud of her heritage.

Being immersed into a completely Spanish-speaking school with a racially diverse student body, it is a given that my cultural upbringing was unique. From a young age,

As we continue to grow up, we learn that being grown up is not as we imagined it. We once convinced ourselves that growing up was the goal to achieve, and life would be much better once we were in fact grown up. When we in fact do grow up, we think back at our youth and laugh because we thought growing up was the most wondrous thing to accomplish, but now, more than ever, we crave for our youth; for the days we would sit in the grass and daydream of what we are to become when we grow up; and finally for the days when life was simple and we could imagine it any which way we wanted it and no one could do a thing about it.

The origins of my family gave rise to the perfect storm that created a tumultuous path for my educational goals, in spite of that, it paved the pathway to humbly engage in requesting your support. As a young boy, my mother would fondly retell the story of her days in school in Villa Union, Durango, Mexico. Her time in school was brief, for she only completed up to the sixth grade. Unlike most typical modest rural town Mexican kids, my mother’s reason for stopping school at a young age wasn’t the lack of monetary means, on the other hand that of an uneducated mother (my grandmother) that believed that young women that stayed in school were only there to flirt and to meet with boys. In light of that my mom would argue and fight with my grandmother, she would struggle to persuade my grandfather to letting her attend school. “Grandpa remained brainwashed by grandma” she would say, my mom mentioned that my grandmother would lie to my grandfather in reference to my mother’s activities in and out of school. “Grandma would tell grandpa that she had seen me holding hands with boys, she knew that would outrage grandpa,” she sadly explained. The educational flame that lit her future’s torch, was slowly dimming. As time passed my mother resigned to the idea of school, and started helping my grandfather out in his bakery by taking care of the bookkeeping.