Cultural Autobiography : My Life Essay

Allan Rufus wrote “Life is like a game of chess. To win you have to make a move. Knowing which move to make comes with insight and knowledge, and by learning the lessons that are accumulated along the way. We become each and every piece within the game called life!” To me this quote means when you know yourself you can foresee the decisions that you need to make to be beneficial. As you grow older you learn and grow and down the road you get to know yourself on a deeper level. Everything I do, what I see, what I believe in, how I act is and the values that I hold is what makes me who I am. The more I am in synch with my behavior and characteristics the better in tune I am to understanding

What is my cultural identity? Personally, I don’t think I am completely assured on what my cultural identity is, but I can do my best on explaining it. However, I won’t get started on that yet, first I’ll explain the occasion of me learning about my identity. At almost the beginning of the year, it was announced in our English class that we would be doing an essay on our cultural identities. When my teacher announced this I thought to myself, “What in the world is a cultural identity, or even my cultural identity?” In these months, we have gotten to learn the definition of culture, and what it means to us, individually., I believe that culture means a group of people that share the same customs, way of life, and beliefs. Also, over these last couple of months we have been reading texts all about people knowing and understanding their cultural identities, meanwhile I still didn’t understand my own. All I know is that I was born on February 11, 2002, I like movies and music, and my mom is from Chile and my Dad is from Virginia. Now that didn’t feel like enough for me to write on, but then I started thinking about all of the cultural differences that my parents have had raising me as a person, and how those have all combined to make me. In my short 15 years of life, the culture clashes have sometimes affected me on my thoughts and opinions, which I’ll talk about later on. As well as how movies and music have affected my perspectives and opinions.

I was born in Dallas, Texas but when I was 3 years old I was taken to my parents’ home country, Mexico. My mother took my younger sister and me to Mexico while my father stayed in the United States and worked to provide for us. I spend 6 years in Mexico and I went to school there. I had an amazing childhood in the place my parents were born and had the opportunity to grow up around my family and culture. I became a fond lover of the traditions and the peaceful life of what I consider my country. I have many amazing memories from living in Mexico. The way everything called for a celebration where everyone was invited. The dedication that every festival I attended showed. Simply all the traditions that even when I live miles away from Mexico have stuck with me, things I still celebrate with my family every year. I love to be able to call myself Mexican American and to be able to share my parents. My love for Mexican culture plays a role in my decision to want to go to Spain. I want to see where some of the customs I know originated from and see where my ancestors came from.

It is hard to challenge what is seemingly normalized in society. Especially when looking into the realm of gender and sexuality, the male and female gender accompanied by heterosexuality is often just accepted and deemed as a social norm. Social institutions such as marriage, health-care laws, and the economic system benefit those who act within the heteronormative behaviors and appropriate gender expression. The gender binary, though, is far from accurate when assuming personal identity. If someone follows the social script of the femininity, he or she is expected to be female and possess female anatomy. The same goes for men: if he or she expresses masculinity he or she is expected to be male with male anatomy. Anything outside of this expectation is deemed socially unacceptable and subject to backlash. With the strong ties Western society has to the gender binary and appropriate gender roles, it is impossible to picture anything else. The Fa’fafine in Samoa, however, present a great challenge to the norms instilled in society.

My grandmother Lynne Murphy is who I chose to interview for my heritage project. This summer at a family birthday party I was speaking short phrases in Spanish while joking around with my dad. My grandmother, sitting beside us, joined in the conversation and starting speaking fluent Spanish. I had no idea she could speak Spanish, so I asked her, “How can you speak Spanish?” Before answering my question she laughed. She went on to tell me that she lived in South America for many years as a teenager. I didn’t have the chance to learn anymore about her childhood until this project was assigned. When I learned we were to focus on a family member’s experience growing up, I immediately thought about my grandmother and the interesting life she seemed

When I first saw in the syllabus the type of paper we would be writing for this course I thought about what culture means to me. What was the culture of my family? Where did we come from? How did we end up in Virginia? How did we end up believing some of the things we believe? To me culture was basically how I was raised—my behaviors, beliefs, values, and ideas cultivated during my youth and its evolvement as I grew into an adult. This truly was to be a very interesting and involved quest for information. Though I attempted to use websites such as www.genealogy.com and www.ancestry.com, I found most of the information from a couple of the adults in my family. Adults? I, too, am an adult, but in my family, age comes

As future, enthusiastic teachers, it’s a fun thought to imagine what kind of teacher we will be and how we will run our classrooms. So, then it only makes logical sense that we go in depth with this train of thought and analyze how we as individuals will be like as educators and how our personal socialization experiences have affected us as human beings. What compiles our cultural identity will be the general makeup as to what kind of teacher we will be. As I write this now, I am only 19 years of age and in the middle of my second year of college. However, I’ve been through enough throughout my 19 years of living that I’ve formulated a definite idea as to what my cultural identity is and how it affects me as a person, friend, and future educator.

My story begins on August 31, 1999 when I was born in Beth Israel Hospital, from there I was raised in Andover, Massachusetts my whole life. I am half Japanese as my mother immigrated from Japan to the United States when she met my father during college. My father being a Caucasian male created an interracial family that I was raised. I went to a technical school where it was predominately a Hispanic culture where much of the students were bilingual. Coming from a family that is solely not one race and going to a school where many students shared a different culture allowed for me to get a unique view of society.

It was not until recently that those who identified as gender nonconforming or homosexual could feel comfortable coming out to the public without facing being ostracized. bell hooks describes her family’s struggle as they believed that she may be homosexual and their actions to attempt to counteract this outcome in her autobiography Bone Black. Her parents tactics remind me of those my friend’s parents adopted when they found out their child was not “normal.”

Many people writing this essay are going to talk about their religion or what race they are. But this is my personal cultural identity essay. I don't have a religion that I talk about or a race that I care about. My cultural identity is about sports, family and everything that makes me, me.

I am Scottish and English, but that means absolutely nothing to me. To me I am your classic white american boy. I am from Lake George New York, born in Glens Falls Hospital. I love to watch American football(My team is the NY Jets or the NY Giants) I am a big Gamer, and I LOVE to grill.

I was born in the summer of 1964, to lower middle class parents, my mother was divorced with having left three young sons behind with her first husband. My father owned a very popular gas station and repair shop, by birth being the result of a torrid love affair, this topic remained in the gossip pool well into my twenties. I was kept in the dark until Jr. high school, my mother was forced to tell me part of her truth, after the principal sent a note home. My mother suffered from depression and substance abuse as a coping mechanism to sooth her pain. At the age of two my mother gave birth to my sister, although, my mother loved us, I believe her pain tortured her relentlessly. Soon my father choose alcohol to numb his

How does a person begin to write a narrative of their own life, relating events and ideas back to their own culture? Well, first, I’d like to give some baseline information about myself. I am a white, middle-class, educated, mid-western, Christian female athlete. I come from a traditional family with a mother, father, one brother, and two sisters. Taking those characteristics into account, I would say that I am a privileged member of society, and being privileged has been part of my culture. In addition, the largest influences on my life and worldview were my family, school, church, and the area I grew up.

Throughout many decades women have been struggling to be equal to men, both at home and in the work place. Women have come a long way and are certainly fighting to gain that equality, but gender roles are very important in our society. They have become important in life from birth, and society continues to push these gender roles. The treatment of the male gender is very different from that of the female, and this issue has become very important to me, as a woman. As children we learn and adapt to specific gender roles, and as we grow they become more evident and more important to our role in a society. There is a lot of discrimination against the female gender. Carol Gilligan argued that

I remember myself sitting near a little block with letters and my mother teaching me the name of each of them. She starts to sing me a song to help me to memorize the alphabet. It is so funny singing the ABC song. At that instant, the door opens, and my father enters the room. That is the first thing carved in my memory, and each time when I think about it, I conclude that we are the best family in the world.