Reflective Writing - My Development as a Writer

A Nomad Writer

America is a place full of immigrants with no single ethnicity or race. America can also be referred to as the ?Melting Pot? because it consists ingredients of multicultural backgrounds. There are cultures such as French American, Asian American, Italian American and African American. I am Mexican American. My culture has helped me to become the writer I am today. My bicultural background and constant moving back and forth from Mexico to America has both influenced and weakened my writing. Although I was born in America, my Mexican culture has always been a part of my life. I have spent the majority of my life in Mexico, and Spanish is my first language. After I turned one, my family moved to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Raised there, I developed a routine of speaking Spanish throughout the day with my mother, and speaking English in the evening with my father when he arrived home from work. Speaking two languages at home was completely normal to me and easy for me to adjust. However, the school I attended as a young kid was much more difficult.

The small kindergarten and elementary school I went to over packed their classrooms with twenty more kids than the set limit. The teachers did not have a lot of physical materials to teach with; they only had two pieces of chalk, a board and stamps. Ciudad Juarez is a highly populated and dangerous city in terms of first-degree crimes such as rape and murder. They have a poor education system offered in both public and private schools, which weakened my first experiences with learning. As a child, I felt unsafe learning in such a poor environment and wanted to leave school and go home early everyday.

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but sometimes I still struggle just as many other foreign speakers do. Regardless of the culture, literature allows for people to express themselves. Because of my bicultural background, I am a person who understands literature as a form of communication for every culture. My experience with two different languages allowed me to become the writer I am today with strong ideas. My writings at the University of Arizona, related to the importance of my culture and how it affects my life. I have become a successful student due to the fact to that great importance I see. My classmates in the required class for my Hispanic Alumni Scholarship have also become successful writers and students. One of the students in my class, Jordan Garcia, has had three of her essays published for the newspaper. Culture makes one a successful person, and motivates one to write.