Northridge's Central American Studies Program Analysis

Did you know that not all teenagers in the world get the opportunity to go to school? In the United States, teenagers and even adults are so accustomed to school being required. They are unaware that it is not like that in all parts of the world. In third-world countries, like Honduras, teenagers do not get to go to school unless they are sponsored, because they cannot afford books, school supplies, school clothes, or shoes. It is not that these teenagers in Honduras choose not to go to school, but more of the fact that they do not have the money to attend school. Although there is a definite difference between high school students in the U.S. and in Honduras when it comes to school availability, students in the U.S. and students in Honduras

Central America Central America, just south of Mexico and North of Panama, consists of just six countries; Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Of those six, all share a distinct common history except for Belize. Belize for one is incredibly small, and while Spanish is the official language of other Central American countries, in Belize English is spoken. So throughout this paper as I carelessly say 'Central American' I am not including Belize whose history and development was far different than the others. Although Central America is located close to the United States in relation to the Eastern Hemisphere, our ways of life are indescribably different.

Peru is located in western South America and it shares borders with Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador and the South Pacific Ocean. Peru is about 1.28 million square kilometers. There are three major regions in Peru: a narrow coastal belt, the wide Andean mountains and the Amazon Basin. The coast is mostly a desert, but contains Peru's major cities. The Andes has two main ranges - Cordillera Occidental and Oriental. Oriental includes Peru's highest mountain called Huascaran, it a peaks out at 22,200ft. On the east side is the Amazon Basin, a region of tropical lowland, the water there is carried out by the Maranon and Ucayali rivers.

As a freshman college student I did not expect that through a fulfillment of graduation requirements, I would stumble across this particular Latino studies curriculum. When I registered for this course my mind was just focused on the fact of attending and perhaps learning a thing or two about my heritage. I also expected to find myself in a position of easy success for this course, and while I believe that I was quite successful, it was not as simple as I projected. The reason behind some of the challenges that I faced were because, unlike most college courses were students are just mindlessly completing homework assignments or writing essays for the purpose to be critiqued, this course engaged emotion and made the students truly immerse themselves

and living in one area for many years, and so it was after a few years

When students leave home to attend college, it is a tough transition, family is one of the most important things in everyone’s lives. There are many opportunities for students to become involved with organizations that incorporate the transition to college alongside having that family feeling. At the University of California, Riverside, one of the many family oriented organizations is Latino Union. Latino Union is an organization made up of mostly, but not limited to, Latinos. They help within the community and build relationships with each other to form the family type bond.

Did you know that Africa is one of the most diverse languages speaking Continents in the world? Definitely, there are an estimated 1500-2000 languages spoken in Africa, all due to the fact of colonization, (Google,2018). While It could cause the mass deal of death, we should colonize South America because the standard of living and quality of life could ascend for all the countries in South America. Also, South America and North America could obtain new and better goods. Finally, when we colonize South America we could make it more industrialized.

The United States is known as the melting pot because of the many different cultures that live here. Hispanics make up 35.3 million according to the 2000 census. Many people don’t realize that within the Hispanic culture there are many different groups. The different groups have different linguistic, political, social, economic, religion, and statues. Most Hispanics see themselves in terms of their individual ethnic identity, as Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, etc. instead of members of the larger, more ambiguous term Hispanic or Latino (U.S. Diplomatic Mission to Germany, 2009).

I was a junior at Brentwood High School, who arrived to the United states from Peru a couple of months ago, and after complaining for three months, Christine Burrows, my guidance counselor, decided to change my Algebra class by a “higher” level math.

It appears that the California educational system understands the need for enhancing cultural understanding. This is a positive sign in education.

Dreams of a better life, vast opportunities, employment, and education are all deciding factors in the plan whether to migrate to America (Hill & Torres, 2010). In reaching their dreams, many Latino families make preeminent sacrifices, most having to work multiple low paying jobs (Hill & Torres, 2010). Despite their strong work ethic, earnest ambition to succeed, understanding of the value of education, and putting a trust in the quality of school that America has to offer, Latinos still remain to be the least educated population group in the U.S. (Hill & Torres, 2010; Villalpando, 2004). In spite of Latinos being the fastest growing minority group in America, research on higher education has rarely been studied. In addition, they remain the least well-educated population in the United States and have a college rate that is two and a half times lower than the average national rate (Villalpando, 2004; Kiehne, 2016). The majority of Latinos have reported that their success is being compromised by discrimination which has resulted in discrepancies in their education (Kiehne, 2016). Even with higher education attempting to meet the needs of Latinos in special outreach and transition programs, reinforcing academic support services, and involving Latino graduates as mentors, such institutional efforts have yet to make any innovation in the level of success that Latinos need in their academic careers (Villalpando, 2004).

American attitudes towards Latin America can be summed up as an extension of larger global directives, and the exclusion of foreign powers in the region. This was highlighted especially during the Cold War as US involvement was essentially in competition with the USSR. Latin America was therefore a mere pawn in the larger context of US-Soviet competition for global dominance. The actions and methods used are also characterized by the lack of an international authority, or an atmosphere of inter-state anarchy, which shaped their calculations in the endeavor to increase their influence over Latin America. When one analyzes the situation, it seems only rational that the United States treated its southern neighbors so, due to the geographical

Upon initial research of the rich heritage of California the two minority groups that stood out as especially influential in historic California and today’s society are the Native Americans and Hispanic Americans. To better understand and identify with these minority groups we must identify the common themes within their day to day life. By researching each culture’s common family traditions, religious beliefs, arts & entertainment, and language one can gain a greater appreciation of many different kinds of people, and in turn have more effective relationships in a multicultural society.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the United States was the most dominant power in the Western Hemisphere. European nations conceded to the United States their right of any intervention in the Western Hemisphere and allowed the United States to do whatever they wanted. The United States took this newly bestowed power and abused it. The United States intervened in many Latin American countries and imposed their policies on to these countries against their will. A perfect example of this aggression is what occurred in the Dominican Republic in 1904. The United States intervened in this sovereign nation and took control of their economy and custom houses. A memorandum from Francis B. Loomis, the United States Assistant

History of the region from the pre-Columbian period and including colonization by the Spanish and Portuguese beginning in the 15th century, the 19th-century wars of independence, and developments to the end of World War II.Latin America is generally understood to consist of the entire continent of South America in addition to Mexico, Central America, and the islands of the Caribbean whose inhabitants speak a Romance language. The peoples of this large area shared the experience of conquest and colonization by the Spaniards and Portuguese from the late 15th through the 18th centuries as well as movements of independence from Spain and Portugal in the early 19th century. Even since independence, many of the various