The Moment You Enter An Academic Setting

I have privileges unfathomable to family back in Mexico, and my mother warned me against taking these privilege for granted. Being born in America did not make me American, she told me, being First Generation American would present seemingly unbearable challenges. She offered advice that I followed to the letter until our first name was not the only thing we shared, until the voice inside my head was replaced with my mother’s.

Erikson theorizes that in such a period, adolescents have certain tasks, one of which is identifying who they are. An individual successfully completes the task by staying true to his or her self, whereas when a person fails that stage, it leads to role confusion; consequently creating a weak sense of self. (Block 2011). The stage also entails a variety of personal challenges and limitations faced as well as a series of needs to be met, including: attention, guidance, independence, stability, and acceptance, among other needs. Meeting an adolescent’s needs is fundamental to their healthy development and personal growth. Nevertheless, adolescence remains as puzzling of a period in time for both the teens experiencing it, as well as for the individuals surrounding them, watching them as they navigate through the trials that adolescence brings them.

In the boiling pot of America most people have been asked “what are you?” when referring to one’s race or nationality. In the short story “Borders” by Thomas King he explores one of the many difficulties of living in a world that was stripped from his race. In a country that is as diverse as North America, culture and self-identity are hard to maintain. King’s short story “Borders” deals with a conflict that I have come to know well of. The mother in “Borders” is just in preserving her race and the background of her people. The mother manages to maintain her identity that many people lose from environmental pressure.

Much to my own embarrassment, my Hispanic heritage had been a thing I hardly thought of. My Father left my family when I was young, and with him went the hopeful wisps I had of learning about myself. It’s not to say that I wasn’t aware that I was Hispanic, but rather, growing up in a mainly white household I didn’t think I had any right to claim my ethnicity. However, the more I look around me and learn about the community Hispanics have grown accustomed to, the more I find that I understand where I came from. To me, being Hispanic isn’t about what you were told when you were younger, or the traditions you grew up with. Rather, being Hispanic is about learning where you come from, and learning about those who share your same heritage. ‘Hispanic’

I am a first generation college student that has made it to a higher education. I see myself as the second daughter, that has come out the land of pride and production. I am from Richmond, California, but that’s just where I geographically from, when in reality I came from a strong family of immigrants. My parents both came to the United States as a young 26, and 24-year-old parents of one child. I did not come until two years later that I came, I came into the world, and was already marked with the name of an anchor baby. As I grow up I did not really know what I was, what I did was always question myself, am I just a reason to keep my parents here longer? Why am I called an anchor baby? I felt that I did not fit in but my schools I went to school always had a mixture of students. I did not know what I was or who I was, I had not direct connection to any ethnicity. When I was in elementary school there where a mixture of Whites, Asians, Latinos, and African Americans ethnicities, grow up in a multicultural area I didn’t think about race or class as much as late in life. Race was a topic that I did not really think and talked about until I was placed into a private school that class was visible, and I began to be more aware or class and race. I would not talk about race or class at school, but I would wait to talk about it when I would get home.

The essay “Being an Other” was written by Melissa Algranati. She is a graduate of the State University of New York at Birmingham and has a master’s degree from Colombia University. The reason as to why she wrote this particular essay was to discuss and describe her experiences of not fitting easily into any particular identity group. Her intended audience are those individuals who seem to have difficulties feeling part of a group. The text was originally published in Thomas Dublin’s “Becoming American, Becoming Ethnic: College Students Explore Their Roots.” Algranati’s identity crisis led her to publish this essay and more importantly show what it was like to be mistaken for another ethnic background. She goes on to make the noteworthy argument,

As the mother of seven grown children, I agree with most of Jeffrey Arnett’s, author of Emerging Adulthood, theories. It is a time of change, with a developmental connection between adolescence and adulthood. During this phase of development, children experience periods of self-discovery transformation. There are favorable outcomes as well as adverse effects during this developmental stage. Furthermore, this successive stage encourages and promotes the change from the dependency of their parents to the independence that is distinctive for adults. This autonomy is beneficial because it prepares the emerging adult for their future independently from their parents. Arnett believes there are five characteristics of emerging adulthood that make it distinguishable from other time periods: the age of identity explorations, the age of instability, the self-focused age, the age of feeling in-between, and the age of possibilities.

What defines you? Is it the many tiny, wriggling spiders that could potentially be inside your body, the experiences you might have had in Istanbul, your list of hobbies which may or may not include crochet, or is it something a bit more trivial, such as where you come from? Who are you? Take a moment to reflect on yourself. In an essay concerning the argument of identity, Richard Rodriguez forces his readers to analyze themselves, particularly during the high climb of immigration in America today, because with the rising amount of cultures and ethnicities finding a home in this country, there really is no “black and white” answer. The question of identity is the key idea in Rodriguez’s Blaxicans, further expanded upon by careful word choice,

Rafael (2016) furtherly argues that identity western psychological expectation of what categorizes as “normal” adolescent identity

Their lives are entangled by what borders represent, which can be, identity, citizenship, inclusion, belonging, community and security (Christou, Miranda; Spyrou, S., 2004). The border between the U.S. and Mexico, has created many inequalities, but also has made important interactions, integration, and economic interdependence. These interactions are shown in the many exchanges and flows between borders. By interaction in the U.S.-Mexican border, it is meant the frequency, intensity, directionality, scale of crossing, type of material and symbolic exchange, and the social and cultural meanings attached to such exchanges (Iglesias-Prieto, 2008). This is how children develop their social representations. As these occur at a frequent basis and at a great amount, it is believed there will be a greater cultural aptitude and abundance, complexity in the ways children perceive and represent the border, and richer concepts of self-identity. Through these complexities, children are challenged to understanding border related issues and become self-critical. With this in mind and I hope to better understand the relation between border influences and the complexity of social representation utilized by

There is no doubt that there are many things that can contribute to a young, emerging adult’s wellbeing. The theory that prompted research on young adults distinctive characteristics, in other words,

For Erikson (1950) adolescence is a period during which individuals seek to avoid dangers of role diffusion and identity confusion by establishing a sense of personal identity. Individuals have to find answers for two major questions “who am I?” and “what is my place in society?” Identity is a “conscious sense of individual uniqueness” and an “unconscious striving for a continuity of experience” (Erikson, 1968, p. 208).

I remember running through into the arms of my grandmother almost everyday after school. “Why do they treat me differently?” I would cry as she ran her fingers through my long, black hair. Growing up, it was difficult for me to discover my true identity because although I was Mexican, I did not speak the language fluently. Accordingly, I was not a full blood Mexican because my grandmother was mixed with European culture and my step-father was Puerto Rican so his culture heavily influenced my up-bringing. At family parties my European family members would speak to me in English while my Hispanic family members would speak to me in Spanish and it would be two different dialects because of some adults being Mexican and some being Puerto Rican. Nonetheless, the other children at school had to single me out and remind me that I was “different.”

This loss of culture creates a divide between immigrants and their native countries. Because of this, they feel displaced. They no longer feel like they belong to their native country, but they also don't feel like they belong to their new country. Immigrants often feel like they don't look “American” enough, because that image has been associated with the White person for so long. The specific aspect of this problem that I will discuss is the schooling system. If more cultures were represented in education, then the problem of forced assimilation could potentially be solved at its roots, with our children. As illustrated through my father, I argue that these assimilationist attitudes begin to be established in the schooling system. Specifically, I will focus on solving this problem in Texas, hoping that it could be a laboratory of democracy. This problem is crucial because it negatively affects the mental health of immigrant students. These students show increased tendencies toward depression, as well as lowered self-esteem (Saenz 193). These two effects can be identified as motivators for gang membership, due to a need to “belong” to someone/something (Saenz 192). Since they don't feel like they belong to the “American” label, they seek that sense of belonging elsewhere. In short, the problem is that the schooling system teaches its students primarily from the perspective of the dominant culture, thereby encouraging students to view all other cultures as

Identity is defined as a “tool” that individuals and groups use to classify and present themselves to others and the world (Owens, 2003). Ethnicity is one aspect of identity that has been studied in relation to academic performance by several different researchers. For instance, Zarate, Bhimji, and Reese (2005) examined how Latino/a high school youth, residing mostly in Southern California, chose ethnic labels to describe themselves. In this study, graduate Latino/a students from UCLA conducted interviews in the language that each participant chose: Spanish, English, or both. During these interviews, respondents were given a sheet of paper that included various ethnic