It was sixth grade when I finally decided to speak English, for some reason I was always ashamed of having a Mexican accent. As I started talking more to others I became more confident, realized that others can understand me well and perhaps I didn’t have an accent after all. It was second grade when I became aware of the English language, during my elementary school years I was enrolled in bilingual classes, but my first two years my teachers only teach in Spanish. It was Mr. Wolf, my second grade teacher that actually began to teach the class in English, the first time I began to hear the sound of it. Second grade the first day of school, I was already late, I remember seeing Mr. Wolf this big tall white man, that always had a coffee breath. The first thing he ever said to me was “Hi, what’s your name?”, I had no I idea what he was asking, so obviously all I did was stare at him, looking all confused he finally asked me in Spanish. In which I was really gratefully in replying back. Nobody before him ever talked to me in English, I like to think that it was not my fault leaving him hanging …show more content…
Mr. Zayas the man that finally decided to actually make me read and will sometimes ignore me if I didn’t speak English back to him. I remember him giving the class a personal narrative homework assignment, that was my first time writing an essay. That day after school I shut myself inside my bedroom, I felt angry for not giving myself that motivation into learning how to write it. I had read it before, so I thought to myself you been reading Tuck Everlasting with Mr. Zayas, just try to remember the words and sound that were in the book. As I tried to remember the sounds of the words, I started to hear this mellifluous sound coming out my mouth. It was this beautiful smooth sound, but now that I think about it maybe it was smooth because I still had a squeaky
Julia Alvarez wrote the novel “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents”. Alvarez, (a Dominican-American novelist) was born in New York City. Her story is about four sisters (The Garcia family) who were living an established, upper class life in the Dominican Republic. They were forced to flee from the Dominican Republic to the United States due to their father’s opposition to Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. The Garcia family were forced to face the challenges that came along with being an immigrant family in a foreign land. In her novel “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,” Alvarez highlights the challenges of immigration, cultural readjustments and family conflicts.
Oftentimes, societal problems span across space and time. This is certainly evident in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents a novel in which women are treated peripherally in two starkly different societies. Contextually, both the Dominican Republic and the United States are very dissimilar countries in terms of culture, economic development, and governmental structure. These factors contribute to the manner in which each society treats women. The García girls’ movement between countries helps display these societal distinctions. Ultimately, women are marginalized in both Dominican and American societies. In the Dominican Republic, women are treated as inferior and have limited freedoms whereas in the United States, immigrant
The 1960s was the time of rebellion and experimentation. Fresh out of high school eighteen year olds who decided to attend college entered into a world of no rules. If you were on your own with no parents to watch your every move would you still follow rules during a time when breaking rules was in? The novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent by Julia Alvarez follows the Garcia family throughout their journey in migrating to the United States and finding themselves in college. The sisters break rules as they encounter the Counterculture of the 1960s questioning their traditions and beliefs during the rebellious era. Once students arrived to college they made their own decisions of what they believed in, protested for their beliefs, and have gender roles play a part in their studies. Alvarez demonstrates through her characters that the 1960s was a time for protesting their individual beliefs, standing up for one another, and change in order to bring peace into the world.
When I was eighteen I had an encounter that involved barriers to my communication with a stranger. I was in Havana; Cuba I had just turned 18 three days earlier and I was out with family exploring the city of Havana. I went to explore one of the 16th century houses alone and ran into a young native man. This guy seemed to be Cuban, his nonverbal communication was that of sexual interest as he looked me up and down several times. He started talking to me but I couldn’t understand most of what he was saying due to his accent, the only thing I did understand was when he called me a Mango. I was very confused when he called me a Mango. I then stereotyped him, in my mind he became just some uneducated native. I experienced some ethnocentrism, I
People are discriminated against because of their race and social position every day. This has been going on for hundreds of years. In Mexican White Boy, Danny and Uno were discriminated against by people around them for being different, but along the way of discovering themselves, they form an unbreakable friendship.
In conclusion, learning English was a challenge when it was first introduced to me, but now I have overcome that challenge. I am able to defend myself in the outside public world of English with no shame at all. I now understand how fortunate I am to know another language different from my own. For me, it is important to still have my first language because it is a way to retain the Mexican culture. It is just the way I was raised to believe.
As a child, I had to navigate from an English-speaking classroom to a Spanish-speaking home. At eight in the morning I was given instruction in English by my professors at school. After three in the afternoon at home, I engaged in Spanish conversation with my mother, father, and siblings. When the summer vacation came around, it was back to speaking Spanish only, and then I regained the Mexican accent that had faded away during the school year. My experience learning English was different from what earlier Spanish-speaking generations in the United States dealt with.
The Court’s reliance on facial appearance is misguided because there is no such thing as a Latino appearance. The appearance standard is distorting the identity of the Latino community by conceptualizing it as one monolithic entity. These conflations of identity ignore the diversity of the Latino community. The idea that Latinos are all dark skinned and undocumented is just a social construction and is not reality. The Latino community is highly heterogeneous in facial and skin appearance because of a long history of racial intermixing. Latino facial appearance varies considerably and runs the gamut from having light to dark: skin, eye color, and hair color. Socially there are vast differences in the community in language and citizenship status. The flawed stereotypes about Latinos affect both those who appear Latino and Latinos who are lawfully in the country.
When I first came to this country, I wasn’t thinking about the language, how to learn it, use it, write, how I’m going to speak with people who are next to you and you want to talk to them. My first experience was in Veterans School, it was my first year in school here in United States, and I was in eight grades. The first day of school you were suppose to go with your parent, especially if you were new in the school, like me. What happened was that I didn’t bring my dad whit me, a woman was asking me a lot of questions and I was completely loss, I didn’t have any idea of what she was telling me and I was scare. One funny thing, I started cry because I fell like frustrate, I didn’t know no one from there. Someone seat next to me, and ask me in Spanish what was wrong and I just say in my mind thanks God for send me this person, then I answered her that I didn’t know Engl...
“Culture is a cluster of intangibles and tangible aspects of life passed down from generation to generation.”(cite) More importantly, culture is define as the way of life of a group of people who share these same values and beliefs, therefore, we will check the Hispanic culture. The U.S. Census Bureau defines Hispanic or Latino as mutual inhabitants in the United States who are of Latin American or Spanish origin. Latinos has become a larger proportion of the U.S. population, there is a greater need for social work education to offer culturally sensitive training to social work students (Furman, Bender, Lewis, & Shears, 2006; Iglehart & Becerra, 1995). A Hispanic woman, Marcela Hede voices that, “Being Hispanic is mainly defined by my language
It was the beginning of third grade but over the summer I had been reading so much I did the reading program at the Anderson township library. So when I went to school that year I was reading more often and when we had reading and writing assignment I would put so much effort in to what I was doing; unlike some people in the IEP class as me. I begin to excel at reading and
My father and brothers would smile and nod along but I knew that they did not understand a single word of what I was saying. There is a huge disadvantage of growing up in the United States and being raised by my single Native American mother: I only speak English. I’ve never learned how to speak Spanish and only knew the occasional phrase like “hola, como estas?” or “donde es baño?” My Spanish teacher growing up was Dora the
She told my mother I would have a better chance of getting a greater education if we moved to Monrovia, because the classes were less impacted and had more resource. When we moved we left our friends, our community, our place we called home. I started first grade as the new kid; I had trouble fitting in at school especially in my classroom. My classmates could speak English fluently they spoke it so fast and with confident no one had stubborn accent everyone sounded the same except me. I couldn’t speak English with ease I felt socially disadvantaged. Due to the fact that I was a Spanish speaking girl in an English society, I felt like being different from other kids. I was terribly shy and hardly spoke a word at school in either language. I let my classmates and teachers think I was just a shy little Mexican girl because I was too embarrassed. I was picked on as a result, but was too afraid to speak up and defend myself. One day during back to school night, my teacher pull my mother aside asked something that I can never forget until the day I die. She asks her what was my nationality was I actually an American or did I come from Mexico. To have a teacher question your
I was sitting in my third grade classroom. Everything was quiet. It was kind of dark, because we used the sunlight more than the room lights. I wasn’t paying too much attention, for I had already done the math work, when the teacher said “Okay, class. Everyone get out a piece of paper, and write down whatever you are thinking while writing.” I panicked. I had no idea how to write a good essay on what I was thinking. I honestly wanted to keep what I was thinking to myself. I started to write down words that were randomly popping in and out of my head. I would pause every now and then because I would’ve stopped thinking words, and pulled out pictures. I was terrified that what I was doing wasn’t enough. Then, I heard a dreadful sentence.
The sound of the wheels from a skateboard on the pavement rattles my head. The only thing stopping the pounding noise was the slight breeze of air that flew through cooling down all the noise. Blowing through the blue curls in my hair the wind covered my ears. No worries could reach me in this moment. The excitement to get to the library kept me flying down the road. I could already imagine the smell in the air of old paperback books enveloping my nose. Getting to run my fingers over new books hard spines that hold the forever stories together.