Cultural Differences Between Guatemala And The US

Again I was struggling not to let myself down and to learn the concepts of the new country. At first everything was hard; I had a lot of difficulties on all my classes due to the lack of reading and understanding the language. I remember when my 7th grade English teacher handed me the book “A Child Called It” by Dave Pelzer; I was stuck in the first page “I’d never realized so many words existed!”(Malcolm X 432).I kept solving my problems by myself, using the dictionary, searching words on the internet, and comparing some Spanish words with English ones. For some reason I didn’t like when people tried to translate and when the school tried to assign me Spanish tutors. I felt that getting help in Spanish wasn’t any good and it just disrupted my learning. Even though school was hard “I refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky.” (Alexie 447).I accomplished my goal of passing 7th grade. During the summer I used to go to the library and read books, because I didn’t understand most of them, and I found reading in English innocuous for the first month. After I got the handle of reading and writing once again, I felt confident of myself, and my life came back to normal.

Talking about my culture and society are two different things. What the norm may not be is the norm for me. Today you will get to know a little about my culture, who I am and how society has changed a little bit of my family traditions.

I studied many things about Guatemala such as, the culture, religion, food, population, geography, imports, exports, and most popular of all sports. The sports of Guatemala is something I found very interesting.

Guatemala is a small country in central America, bordered by Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, and Mexico. Guatemala is best known for their indigenous Mayan culture and excavated ruins of the Mayan empire, nature, and their world class coffee. If you visit Guatemala, you’ll see that it is unique in many ways.

My entire family was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. After three and a half years of living there my family decided to seek a better future in The United States. My father would go to the United States back and forth to work and earn money to send to us in Mexico. Eventually my mother was able to get a visa and my brother along with my little sister had an alternate way into the United States. We lived in Dallas Texas and Atlanta Georgia before settling in Howard county Maryland in a very small apartment. Luckily we were doing pretty well with my dad being the only one knowing English at the time. My father was working two jobs and I was getting ready to start kindergarten. I was very excited because the education we would have received in Mexico was nothing compared to the education in Howard County. I was excited for what was to come, but there were disadvantages of knowing only Spanish. Being bullied because of my poor English had an impact on me. I was in completely separate classes learning things that were simple compared to the regular course. I was excluded from certain activities, field trips and assemblies. I was clueless at first though as I slowly learned the language I understood things a lot more.

Before I turned four years old, my mother and I moved to join my father in Berwyn, Illinois. My sister ended having to stay back a couple of months so that she could finish her school year. We arrived to a nice apartment in the suburbs, it was a complete scenery change than what I was use to. Everyone seemed to have giant yards, bright green grass, large fences, and freshly painted houses. Back in Fresnillo, we had our large home, but it was rare for houses to have such large yards, so close to the heart of the town. From the time of the move until my first year in kindergarten, I had a bit of time to adjust, watching cartoons in English, I am not quite sure how I picked it up but I did. At that time my mother only spoke Spanish, my father is bilingual, but he would speak to us in Spanish.

Guatemala has more people than any other Central American country, with an estimated population of 11,980,000 it is home to many different cultures. The population can be divided into two groups; Indians and people of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry. But in Guatemala, being called an Indian or a non-Indian does not depend entirely on a person 's ancestry. It is basically a matter of how people live and of how they categorize themselves. For example, a Guatemalan is considered an Indian if he or she speaks an Indian language, wears Indian clothing, and lives in a community where the people follow the Indian ways of life. The Indians think of themselves more as part of their community than of their country. They pay little attention to

Not everyone has experienced traveling to another country, but many people dated another individual from another country before. From a life experience, dating someone from Guatemala is a big experience for me because dating that person I was able to determine how Guatemala culture is just by the way he carries himself. This experience is very interesting because I was able to gain knowledge on how Guatemalans do things and it was like learning something new that I never knew about. However, it is very difficult because we both really don’t understand each other’s language. This is why it is important to understand the major concepts of ethnocentrism because people won’t always be around things that they are more familiar with.

The climate is much different in Guatemala. While they have a dry season and it will not rain from October till at least a couple months after February, we have a lot of our rain during these months. In my city we all have electricity and our houses are all wired with a surplus of sockets and individual switches; while in Cesar’s village the countryside is just recently receiving electricity, and their homes only have two sockets and one switch that turns them on and off at the same time. Our Easter celebrations are similar, we both decorate eggs and dress up; but while they dance and set off firecrackers; we have scavenger hunts, go to church, and have a fancy dinner. We both have similar goals to improve our city and to succeed in school.

In 1964, Guatemala was being run by a military junta, violence was a part of every day life, the economy was in shambles, and jobs were scare (Cuevas, 2011). It was in this setting that a young man, my future father-in-law, took a chance at a better life for he and his family. Enticed by rumors of prosperity in the United States, Alex and his brother Rene saved their money to journey to Chicago, leaving their families behind in a search for hope that was borne of desperation. Alex left his wife Ruth with 20 Guatemalan Quetzal, the equivalent of $20 dollars, and their three children, Vivien, 5, Ingrid, 3, and Marvin, a newborn baby. What experience lay in store for he and his family? How would they fare in an unknown country, without

Arriving at a foreign country at the age of eleven years old was and exiting and yet intimidating experience. High buildings, wide roads, newer and nicer cars on the streets were some of the first things I noticed when I arrived to the city of Los Angeles CA. Living in a country where you were not born in could be difficult some times. Although Spanish is spoken at a grand scale in CA, it was difficult to communicate with and understand the teachers from my classes at the elementary level since all they spoke was English. Los Angeles is a city of great diversity, therefore it is believed to be the perfect place for any person arriving from another country to not feel like a foreign, such believe

The Guatemalan Culture (also known as Chapines) has many improvements to be made, but they are still more stable than other cultures. There are many cultural aspects to the Guatemalan way of life. The culture comes from Mayan and Spanish influences. Guatemala is a beautiful city that borders mexico to the south in Central America. Almost half of their population lives in Urban areas and they speak two different languages. People first started living in this area around nine hundred A.D. The average american would not understand the way of life in Guatemala.

There are many differences between americans and mayans. There are also lots of similarities. One thing is they had sacrifices. They also had gods.

to my family. It is hard for us to survive in a totally unfamiliar country and we

I never thought I was going to be in Florida. It impacted my life tremendously. I knew I had to learn a different language. My English level was steady. I knew I had to improve my English. I worked on it twice as hard as when I was in Mexico. In school when people talked to me and asked questions, I was afraid to answer back, because I was unsure if I said it wrong or not. I had to overcome it and pronto. Making friends in school was easy, because I guess they are curious where I’m from or wanted to know my name in Spanish.