The Importance Of My Identity

Am I Mexican,or am I American? One day, I was thinking about how I had to work twice as hard to embrace them both to please both cultures. I then realized that if I am working to please them both,then I am both. Speaking a language is not a due to pay to be who I am. There is no checklist to qualify for,and no test to pass,you are who you are. I am a bridge that has its beams planted in both sides of the Mexican-American border. When school began and I enrolled in honor level Spanish classes, I did it, not because people thought I had to,but because it will be beneficial to my life. People would sometimes tell me the stereotypical things they believed about hispanics,such as the beliefs that we are lazy. Instead of tearing me down, that only made my work ethic head into overdrive. Confining to others expectations was not what I wanted for myself. Like the bridge between the two cultures,I would stand tall and remain unaffected by the remarks people threw at me. Growing up as a Mexican-American has proven to have its challenges,but I am grateful. These trials have helped make me into the person that I am today,and has given me a different perspective on life than the average

For those of us who are a different ethnical group such as Hispanics and Latinos we are believed be individuals who come from Mexico and bring drugs along with criminals. Being the daughter of two immigrant parents I am expected to fail as compared to those who are of a higher and white family. However, the thing is that we are labeled as failure due to the ethnicity that we have running through our veins. Being born in the United States there will always be someone who believes that they are the center of attention and that the world revolves around them. For individuals of this ethnicity such as myselves we aren’t given many opportunities or materials that will benefit our futures. For example, some schools may focus more on students that came from higher and better schools rather than the poor schools. They will quickly label us and make assumptions that we’re never going to learn, get well paying job and that many girls will end up pregnant rather than staying in school.

Society looks at us ass small unnecessary human beans but in reality we are important and we are everywhere we work hard like the ants we are together as one working. Without us there wouldn’t be construction people cleaning people or worst of all there wouldn’t be people who will collect crops from the farms so no crop collectors no food. Like ants without them the environment wouldn’t be clean and there wouldn’t be a lot of plants for oxygen. So without them we would of have a unclean environment and no clean oxygen. Therefore we Hispanics are like ants we might be small but we are very

“We all use stereotypes, all the time, without knowing it. We have met the enemy of equality, and the enemy is us,” said Annie Murphy Paul who is a magazine journalist and book author that writes about the biological and social sciences. Stereotypes are a part of everyday life. Every person, young or old, has been labeled with a positive or negative stereotype. They are heard everyday and sometimes label certain groups of people. As Martina Navratilova said, “Labels are for clothing. Labels are not for people.” A lot of time stereotypes don’t fit what they are labeling. They can have a bad effect on people’s emotions, the way people interact with each other and their social lives. A common stereotype of many U.S. citizens is that all Mexican immigrants are criminals and have come to the U.S. illegally; therefore, this stereotype has a bad affect on the way Mexicans and other people think and act.

Mexican Americans also shared problems of poverty and discrimination with African Americans. According to Healy, Mexican Americans, like African Americans, have been viewed as cheap, unskilled agricultural labor that has been methodically excluded from mainstream America. Unlike most immigrants from Europe, who lived in urban areas, Mexican Americans and African Americans were prone to live and work in rural parts of the United States. Because both groups lived in less urban areas they had limited resources for education, skill development and economic opportunities. At the same time, however, Mexican Americans

Latinos are all illegal immigrants/dangerous thugs who sleep around, do drugs, and break the law, universal generalizations seen in the twenty-first century. Stereotypes have become a method of systematic suppression in America, a way to judge Latino immigrants and their children, to trap them in an endless cycle of misery and discrimination. Michael Dorris perfectly explains negative stereotypes influencing a minority in “Crazy Horse Malt Liquor”. Dorris describes the stereotypical views of Native Americans, and how they have a pattern of being negative, similar to how stereotypes about Latinos tend to be negative. The people of America form opinions based on stereotypes, stereotypes about Latinos that aren’t necessarily true. Stereotypes have become part of a system;Hollywood exploits them and then used as a form of judgment, which harms both the physical and mental health of both Latino immigrants and Latino citizens.

Hispanic and Asian immigrant try to take advantage of this opportunity, these young immigrants are given the chance for a free education. The traditions and customs in the different households create an act of behavior for school. “Parental demands, fear of failure, competition and pride are fueling Asia's academic ascension” (Breitenstein para.7). This signifies that Asians are giving high pressure to do well in school which creates a base for the stereotype that Asians are above intelligent than other common races. Hispanics are not seen as highly academic compared to other races. These Hispanic immigrants are grown amongst the responsibility of taking care of their families. Work is the only route in order to create a source of money towards the payment of house needs and wants. Education is seen as optional rather than mandatory in this culture. “Students did not fail; schools failed students” (Acuna para.1). Through education, Hispanics are not seen as potential candidates for academic success. Hispanics are educated in order to fit the standard stereotype of being of a lower class and only having the ability of labor work. Stereotypes of Hispanics and Asians create the idea of how society interprets these two cultures which can create dramatic affects in race

In Mexico I’m not seen as Latina, Hispanic, Chicana or Mexican. For my Mexican relatives I’m just seen as an “American” or as they would say a “pocha”.

When people think of the Mexican heritage, the first image that pops into their head is seldom a successful individual with a college degree, and that made me ashamed of whom I was.

My family which includes my mother, father and sister all live in a predominately white upper class town. Life was a lot easier for me as I was a part of the upper-class community in the town. Being a part of the upper middle class allowed me to attend an out of state college. On the other hand, many of my friends from school stayed in Massachusetts to attended community college and other in state colleges as it is a less of a financial burden. Many of the student attended my high school and went to those colleges were predominately Hispanic culturally. As they were Latino, I appeared to them as a generic Asian. With this came stereotypes such as the assumption that I was

Hispanic’s in America, much like many other groups of immigrants, are not always welcomed when they arrive in the United States. They are often seen as inferior or as illegal. Many Americans believe that Hispanics should be deported and that they come to America to take their jobs away from them. Additionally, many Americans consider all Hispanics to be Mexican and fail to recognize the differences between different Latin American countries. In spontaneous situations, people may be quick to negatively judge another based on their appearance and their perceived stereotypes of a certain group of people.

However, many Hispanic families were and in some cases, still are viewed as lower-class citizens. According to Barrientos, “To me, speaking Spanish translated into being poor. It meant waiting tables and cleaning hotel rooms. It meant being left off the cheerleading squad and receiving a condescending smile from the guidance counselor when you said you planned on becoming a lawyer or a doctor” (561). They are not respected in a lot of communities, they live dirty, and they have bad jobs. These stereotypes are reasons why Barrientos did not want to be called Mexican and never wanted to learn Spanish. If diversity had been celebrated when Barrientos was a child, as it is celebrated and honored now, she would have grown up speaking Spanish and being proud of her heritage.

Personal identity is essential in the human experience. Identity is complex and can be broken down into two main groups: introspective identity, and bodily identity. Introspective identity is based off of the groups, mentalities, or beliefs that you align yourself with, and bodily identity is based off of the physical side of yourself. Whether physical or introspective, your identity impacts every action you take. Whether choices ranging from what colors you prefer to which college you want to attend are primarily based off of your introspective identity, which is a combination of both memory and consciousness, physical identity impacts how others perceive you. Consciousness is mainly the awareness of bodily identity as well as continuous introspective identify, while memory is awareness of introspective identity. These two different facets of identity are imperative in the distinction between bodily identity and introspective identity. In means of personal identity introspective identity (which is evident in memory), is essential, while bodily identity (based partially in consciousness) has less credit.

Everybody has an identity, it makes them individual and unique, and it defines who you are as a person. This project about my identity showed me what makes me unique. I would have never known how much my friends mean to me or how my identities connect with each other. I have three identities that make me who I am, cultural, personal, and social. A specific quality that covers my cultural identity is being Czechoslovakian. Both sides of my family have at least a part of Czech in them. My great-grandparents are from Czech Republic and my grandpa was the first generation in America, he was born in Ohio. This is very important because I have always identified as Czech and it is a big part of me, as I am so interested in ancestry. For my personal identity, the biggest part is my personality, being loud and outgoing, has always been important to me. The reason being, it is how people view me. A lot of people know me as the loud person or the person who talks a lot. That is meaningful to me considering I like people to view me in a certain way The last identity, social, is one of the most important to me because it involves my friends, and through this project, I learned how vital they really are to my social identity. I realized that I have a good amount of friends in this project. It is nice to have people as a support system and to relate with. These qualities show that I value being loud and outgoing. It also says that I value my family and they are a big part of life. The last one, social, ties in with the first one because it shows I am outgoing and friendly.

Just a few days before I had to do this essay, my mom shared a story with me. In the middle of a Spanish lesson, one of her students asked her a completely unrelated question: Why do Mexican children always wear frilly dresses and slippers to the supermarket, and why do the men always crowd in the back of pick-up trucks to go to work? Although some of the students thought it was funny, my mother, of course, couldn't pass up this opportunity to respond and teach a more important lesson, interestingly enough, about stereotypes. She reminded me of our trip to Mexico some time ago and related those experiences to her students.