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My Cultural Identity: My Migration To The United States

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For most of my life, I had always felt that I had no cultural identity. Although, if you knew my family’s culture background, you would think that was absurd. Most Americans live their lives not knowing their origins or how long their families have been in America. In contrast, I have known that information my whole life. My family emigrated to the U.S. from Nigeria in 1995 and my parents were the first of both of their families to settle in the States. Growing up, I learned many things about Nigerian people. In general, Nigerians tend to be three things: loud, overdramatic, and obnoxiously boisterous. They talk so loudly that when people who aren’t Nigerian hear a casual conversation going on between them, they think it’s a shouting match and that …show more content…

These characteristics encompass who Nigerians are as a people, but this has never been an adequate description of me. I don’t tend to be loud on a regular basis or shout when I speak to people. I can be dramatic, but this presents itself mainly in my wild imagination. I enjoy listening to stories, but I don’t tell them well. And, astonishingly, I have never had a significant appetite for traditional food, which baffles every Nigerian I meet. I love to sing and dance, but I can rarely do those things in public without feeling bashful. I was so unlike my family and so detached from their culture that I looked to another side of my life for an identity. In my household, people call me the “American.” I eat American food, can barely understand Yoruba, my family’s native tongue, and am generally deemed unsociable and awkward at gatherings. To most Nigerians, these facts essentially make me an American. But I didn’t feel like I was. Although I had natural born citizenship, I had grown up in an immigrant family that lead a lifestyle incompatible with the one I encountered any time I wasn’t around other

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