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The Diversity Of The United States

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Citizenship The presence of Latinos in the United States challenges the notion of there being only one specific type of American citizen, an English-speaking person who lives only in relation to an "Anglo" heritage. Alongside other minority groups, Latinos tend to believe in the notion that the United States must be made up of one bounded territory, within which people speak a singular language and experience one culture. So, when the Anglo groups are faced with Spanish speaking people who are in touch with their Latino heritage, they feel threatened by the people who can speak both Spanish and English. The response to this sense of threat involves marginalization and the obvious exclusion of Latino groups in the United States. At the …show more content…

In other words, “cultural” refers to the subjective views in which people evaluate themselves, within certain communities and their nation as a whole. An outsider has no right or ability to judge whether a person should be respected or not. Furthermore, the very definition of what people consider “respect” varies greatly from group to group and individual to individual. People are often quite strong in their personal feelings about what should count as respect and what should not. Citizenship includes not only legal definitions or documents (whether they have them or not), but also the vernacular elements of citizenship that we recognize in social setting, such as ordinary language phrases, which acknowledge levels of citizenship, such as first-class versus second-class citizenship. In a democratic nation like America, the goal is to minimize second-class citizenship and have to first-class citizenship be available for all. This idea reaffirms that citizenship happens both in the relationships between citizens and the state and in the relationship among fellow citizens, whether they be in neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, or workplaces. These questions of citizenship include a sense of belonging, and of having a voice and being able to use it. In “Cultural Citizenship, Inequality, and Multiculturalism,” anthropologist Renato Rosaldo looks at the difference between cultural citizenship and citizenship as a legal status that validates

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