Culture is the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of particular people. The way that individuals are shaped by their environments as well as social situations influences the way in which one can view the world around them. Culture influences a person’s perspective of others in the way they see other people, treat other cultures, and view one’s own cultures as shown in the passages, Where Worlds Collide, The Hunger of Memory, and An Indian Father’s Plea. The passage, Where Worlds Collide written by Pico Iyer, expresses the thoughts that travelers experience when they arrive at Los Angeles International Airport. The author describes the unfamiliar environment from the perspective of overwhelmed immigrants as “they seek they come out, dazed, disoriented, heads still partly in …show more content…
In the story, the author is getting pulled in various directions. Rodriguez wants to stay true to his Mexican culture for his parents sake claiming they, “grow distant, apart, no longer speak,” (Rodriguez 105), but also wants to belong in American culture where his education has driven him to a position not many Mexicans get to or have to opportunity to be. This story confronts the idea that anyone can succeed as long as they are willing to sacrifice their cultural identity in the process. The author’s persona in An Indian Father’s Plea, written by Robert Lake, is an angry Indian father who is upset with the treatment of his child in school. He claims the teacher has “already labeled him a “slow learner”’ because his son is Indian (Lake 109). This plays on the major controversial topic of racial or cultural profiling. The narrator speaks in a very intelligent tone, which only proves to his argument that you can be culturally diverse and intellectual. An Indian Father’s Plea is a prime example on why you cannot judge a book by its
Becoming an American requires adjustment to the English language and interacting with different people. In the essay “Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood,” Richard Rodriguez illustrates the distinctions between individual and social identity as a Mexican immigrant. He explains individual identity through the process of considering himself as an American citizen. Rodriguez also acknowledges the necessity of assimilating into the American culture and the consequences that follow.
The Essay, I have chosen to read from is ReReading America was An Indian Story by Roger Jack. The topic of this narrative explores the life of an Indian boy who grows up away from his father in the Pacific Northwest. Roger Jack describes the growing up of a young Indian boy to a man, who lives away from his father. Roger demonstrates values of the Indian culture and their morals through exploration of family ties and change in these specific ties. He also demonstrates that growing up away from one’s father doesn’t mean one can’t be successful in life, it only takes a proper role model, such as the author provides for the young boy.
Culture is a unique way to express the way one shows the world and others how different each one is. Culture affects the way one views the world and others. This is demonstrated in the stories “Ethnic Hash” by Patricia Williams, “Legal Alien” by Pat Mora, and “By Any Other Name” by Santha Rama Rau. These stories come together to show examples of how people of different cultures are viewed by others as different. Mora, Williams, and Rau all have very unique styles, and this is shown throughout the following quotes.
This book was published in 1981 with an immense elaboration of media hype. This is a story of a young Mexican American who felt disgusted of being pointed out as a minority and was unhappy with affirmative action programs although he had gained advantages from them. He acknowledged the gap that was created between him and his parents as the penalty immigrants ought to pay to develop and grow into American culture. And he confessed that he got bewildered to see other Hispanic teachers and students determined to preserve their ethnicity and traditions by asking for such issues to be dealt with as departments of Chicano studies and minority literature classes. A lot of critics criticized him as a defector of his heritage, but there are a few who believed him to be a sober vote in opposition to the political intemperance of the 1960s and 1970s.
For many, our goal is to reach the American Dream: a good job, a home we can call our own, and wealth. However, there are others who only dream of it because they are stuck in a hole that restricts them from reaching it. Charles Bowden, author of “Blue”, takes readers on a journal across the desert to get a better understanding on why people from Mexico risk their lives to cross to the United States. He provides detailed images and descriptions of Mexicans that have lost their lives trying to cross the desert. Along with his friend Bill, they travel across the desert and encounter danger with snakes, the effects of extreme weather conditions, and experiences thirst, hunger, and fatigue.
Establishing an identity has been called one of the most important milestones of adolescent development (Ruffin, 2009). Additionally, a central part of identity development includes ethnic identity (ACT for Youth, 2002). While some teens search for cultural identity within a smaller community, others are trying to find their place in the majority culture. (Bucher and Hinton, 2010)The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian chronicles Junior’s journey to discovery of self. As with many developing teens, he finds himself spanning multiple identities and trying to figure out where he belongs. “Traveling between Reardan and Wellpinit, between the little white town and the reservation, I always felt like a stranger. I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other” (p.118). On the reservation, he was shunned for leaving to go to a white school. At Reardon, the only other Indian was the school mascot, leaving Junior to question his decision to attend school he felt he didn’t deserve. Teens grappling with bicultural identities can relate to Junior’s questions of belonging. Not only is Junior dealing with the struggle between white vs. Indian identities, but with smaller peer group identities as well. In Wellpinit, Junior is th...
Growing up on a reservation where failing was welcomed and even somewhat encouraged, Alexie was pressured to conform to the stereotype and be just another average Indian. Instead, he refused to listen to anyone telling him how to act, and pursued his own interests in reading and writing at a young age. He looks back on his childhood, explaining about himself, “If he'd been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity” (17). Alexie compares the life and treatment of an Indian to life as a more privileged child. This side-by-side comparison furthers his point that
Also, the fact that the Hispanic family speaks english and obtained other "American" characteristics. Within the story, the narrator is faced with remarks by the older generation of Hispanics who have "...strong Mexican roots"
The United States has often been referred to as a melting pot. Whether or not that statement is an accurate representation of the denizen of the United States, it still carries with it the appropriate connotation. The United States is a mixture of many different peoples, cultures, and traditions. For millions of people, that means that they identify with the culture of the country they come from, as well as the culture of the United States. This causes feelings of isolation and discomfort for people experience these potentially conflicting cultural identities. In the poems “Legal Alien” by Pat Mora and “The Translator at the Reception for Latin American Writers” by Julio Marzán, this theme is explored in great depth. Throughout both poems, the use of diction, irony, and form emphasize the poets’ feelings of isolation as a direct result of conflicting cultural identifies.
Adjusting to another culture is a difficult concept, especially for children in their school classrooms. In Sherman Alexie’s, “Indian Education,” he discusses the different stages of a Native Americans childhood compared to his white counterparts. He is describing the schooling of a child, Victor, in an American Indian reservation, grade by grade. He uses a few different examples of satire and irony, in which could be viewed in completely different ways, expressing different feelings to the reader. Racism and bullying are both present throughout this essay between Indians and Americans. The Indian Americans have the stereotype of being unsuccessful and always being those that are left behind. Through Alexie’s negativity and humor in his essay, it is evident that he faces many issues and is very frustrated growing up as an American Indian. Growing up, Alexie faces discrimination from white people, who he portrays as evil in every way, to show that his childhood was filled with anger, fear, and sorrow.
Racism, stereotypes, and white privilege are all concepts that affect all of us, whether we believe it or not. If an adolescent of a minority can distinguish these concepts in his society, then we all should be aware of them. These concepts are all clearly demonstrated in “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”. Anyone and everyone could clearly understand this novel, but the intended audience is middle school to college level students. The novel’s goal is to help white students understand the effects of white privilege in an easier, more understandable way.
Muhammad Ali once said, “He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.” Sherman Alexie makes this a big point in his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. This book, Arnold “Junior” Spirit is faced with the decision of whether he should trade his familiar school life on an Indian Reservation for a slightly better education at an all-White school in a small town named Reardan. This is his only way to achieve a better future. Throughout the novel Junior has to fight against criticism for acting differently in order to protect his mindset. Outside forces such as discrimination of race or social status deeply impact one’s hopes, dreams and self-esteem.
Culture is the totality of learned, socially transmitted customs, knowledge, material objects and behavior. It includes the ideas, value, customs and artifacts of a group of people (Schaefer, 2002). Culture is a pattern of human activities and the symbols that give these activities significance. It is what people eat, how they dress, beliefs they hold and activities they engage in. It is the totality of the way of life evolved by a people in their attempts to meet the challenges of living in their environment, which gives order and meaning to their social, political, economic, aesthetic and religious norms and modes of organization thus distinguishing people from their neighbors.
The conception of “culture” is complicated and it is defined in different way. The meaning of culture that Victor Barnouw expressed in his book “Culture and personality” is as follows “A culture is the way of life of a group of people, the complex of shared concepts and patterns of learned behavior that are handed down from one generation to the next through the means of language and imitation” (Barnouw, 1985). Meanwhile, Kroeber and Talcott Parsons suggested that culture is described as “transmitted and created content and patterns of values, ideas, and other symbolic-meaningful systems as factors in the shaping of human behavior and the artifacts
The term “culture” refers to the complex accumulation of knowledge, folklore, language, rules, rituals, habits, lifestyles, attitudes, beliefs, and customs that link and provide a general identity to a group of people. Cultures take a long time to develop. There are many things that establish identity give meaning to life, define what one becomes, and how one should behave.