...two writers, both of them tried to assimilate into the American culture which they immigrated to and longed for getting involved with, by overcoming the inability of fitting in the society while struggling with their own particular difficulties, emphasizing that sometimes you have to do something against your original heritage in order to achieve the assimilation. The author, David Jacobson, of the essay “Reflections: Growing-Up Grown” expresses how grateful he was for his non-English...
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...Using Language to Reclaim and Reform Identity In her essay “Spanish Lessons,” Christine Marin describes her struggle with two language identities and how finding her voice in both Spanish and English allowed her to discover the power of language. Similarly in “Coming Into Language,” Jimmy Santiago Baca discusses how, in spite of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, language became a powerful outlet through which his life was changed. Both essays describe situations in which language and education were used as tools to empower the authors to reclaim their respective identities. I identify with the authors’ struggle to turn language and education from sources of humiliation to platforms of empowerment. Marin describes to...
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...All my childhood home videos are of me running around in a diaper like any other child’s home video; however, the major difference between my home videos and others is that I am running around screaming in Hindi. As I grew older and began to go to preschool the videos slowly transitioned to me speaking English. I came very close to completely forgetting how to speak Hindi, yet my parents only spoke to me in Hindi at home. Even though speaking another language has countless benefits, I have always felt different from the typical American teenager. Richard Rodriguez describes how speaking a distinct language created a barrier between his family and the rest of the country whereas Audre Lorde retells her first encounter with racism when she visited Washington D.C. Richard Rodriguez’s essay “Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood” and Audre Lorde’s essay...
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...Summary and Personal Responses to Tanya Maria Barrientos’s “Se Habla Espanol” English 115 July 13, 2014 In her essay “Se Habla Espanol” Tanya Maria Barrientos expresses her struggle of being a pure Latina who doesn’t speak Spanish. Being born in Guatemala, a Spanish speaking country, she and her family moved to the United States of America at three years old. (Barrientos, 2011) now living in Texas her parents made the decision that their children would cease speaking Spanish only to speak, read, and write English molding them into America’s Anglo culture. Barrientos set out to defy the stereotypes being placed on brown people while at the same time believing them herself. She stated “To me, speaking Spanish translated into being poor. It meant waiting tables and cleaning hotel rooms.” (Barrientos) Not being seen as Mexican was a compliment in her eyes while not speaking Spanish equated to being white. Clearly she was not proud of her heritage and at the age of 16 in attempt to reverse the disdain for her culture Barrientos was sent to Mexico for the summer by her father. To her surprise pride emerged but created a new dilemma. How can you be a proud Latina and not speak Spanish? She set out to learn it. After taking several Spanish classes she continued to feel laughable around native Spanish speakers. Not only did she struggle with the language but with the fact that she was now frowned upon as a Spanish woman who can’t speak the language. Barrientos eventually...
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...Brieana Mcclean English 101 Professor Herdzina January 26th, 2018 Major Essay 3 Outline Many of us have favorite Sports teams and as a way of familiarizing ourselves we usually point them out by their mascots and names. Little did we know that our team’s mascot or name may be offensive to a particular culture and has an underlying meaning. According to the Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indians, as early as 1912 Indian names for sports teams have been used in the professional sector. Following this example many high schools started naming their teams using Indian culture and the use of Indian inspired Mascots. We may like the way the teams name and its mascots suit them, but to the Native American...
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... Professor Ober First Year Writing 29 September 2014 The Contact Zone The Holocaust happened because two groups of people were grappling with each and one was stronger than the other. Wars typically occur because two cultures disagree and choose to settle it, and the strong culture prevails. African American and Caucasian people used to be exiled for getting married, because they were different. There are millions of different cultures in the world today and every day is an example of how they clash. An author, Mary Louise Pratt, wrote an essay referring to these conflicts. Her essay made it possible to further examine these struggles. In works such as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and “Family Stories From the Trail of Tears” Pratt’s essay makes it possible to deeply examine the clashing culture and gain insight into how it impacted the world today. Mary Louise Pratt’s essay is called “Arts of the Contact Zone”. She defines a contact zone as a space where two cultures wrestle with each other’s ideas and beliefs. She goes on to discuss how these contact zones have come to help shape society, and how the aftermath is world changing. Her essay provides an excellent analysis of what happens when two distinct cultures come into contact, and most importantly, how that affects others. She also examines the two phenomena that occur as a result of the Contact Zone. One sensation, authoethnography, gives the reader first hand insight into cultures. The other, transculturation...
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...Jose Santos Professor McGuire English 111 26 July 2014 Bilingual, Bilingualism, and a Forgotten Language In the essays “Aria: a Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood” written by Richard Rodriguez and “Loss of Family Languages: Should Educators Be Concerned” written by Lily Wong Fillmore, the authors are concerned about immigrants forgetting their native languages as they get Americanized. Both authors are targeting a mature audience of immigrants, which have come to America to become citizens. Both authors use concerned tone with hopes that their audience will want to contribute to change. Furthermore, Fillmore draws her evidence from stories of other writers’ essays. Rodriguez, on the other hand illustrates his evidence from personal experiences and memories of his life while growing up. This essay exemplifies the differences and similarity of the evidence used, tones, styles, and the intended audiences. Fillmore’s and Rodriguez’s evidence are similar and different, in their support of the idea of bilingual education in schools. Fillmore’s evidence differs from Rodriguez’s as she uses statics, research, and other writer’s quotes as her support. She uses this Supreme Court’s ruling to show that the court believes immigrants require assistance staying bilingual, “… Lau v. Nichols held that these children must be provided instructional help to overcome the linguistic barrier…” (Fillmore 260). She also cites the story of a Chinese immigrant family that falls apart as the kids...
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...The essay I chose for this assignment was “Se Habla Espanol” By Tanya Barrientos. While reading some of the passages from the essay, you learn a lot about the author and her journey of being a Latina woman living in America. You can tell that she has a hard time accepting that she is an English speaking, Latina woman. Once Tanya moved to America, at age three, she lost the ability to speak any Spanish. Even while talking with her parents they spoke in English. She tried asking her parents to speak to her in Spanish, but they raised her to believe that if she spoke English, she would “make it” in America. Her parents believed that if she could speak English without any sign of an accent, she would be seen as a true American, despite her obvious ethnicity. From this, she began to look at her heritage in a negative way. From pure observation she related speaking Spanish, with being poor. Between her friends and her family, she felt like she was fighting alone in the strive to be a part of her hidden culture. When she was sixteen, she realized she hated Mexico for the wrong reasons. Her father wanted to show her that she could be proud of where she comes from, as well as fitting in in America. She then discovered that she loved her culture. By the time Tanya was in college, the way people thought was different. She had noticed a big change in how the nation viewed ethnic identity. As she states in the essay, “Not all Poles speak Polish. Not all Italians speak Italian...
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...main points is African were forced into slavery, Native American population declined and Alfonzo letter to stop slave trade. My thesis is that these main points were the reason why Europe corrupted that point of time. Native American population depopulated due to disease and war and could not provide enough work and the proof is in Document 1 which says that they declined because Europeans had brought disease and the Spaniards did not want to do the work themselves which to the Europeans access to another cheap labor which was the African Slave Trade and then document 6 it tells us that America is being depopulated which was where the Natives were, and in document 7 King Alfonzo letter says mentioned merchants are taking every day our natives which started the depopulation....
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...participation and negotiation of self (see Higgins, forthcoming; Kinginger, 2004; Lam, 2000; Morita, 2004; Ohara, 2001; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000; and Solé, 2007 among others). The trend is resonated in the growing interest in language learner identity and the studies in narratives. In this paper, a case of heritage language learner will be investigated upon the theoretical frame of poststructuralism. Narrative inquiry will be used to analyze how she negotiates her learner identity. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: First, by looking at the struggle a language learner makes to acquire her heritage language, I reclaim the centrality of identity in defining heritage language learners. Second, to widen the horizons of narrative studies to the cyber space as it provides an ample source of easily accessible data and it has become one of the commonplace media of daily communication. Heritage Language Learners and Identity To refer to the Heritage Language Learners (HLLs), various terms have been implemented such as ‘native speakers,’ ‘quasi native speakers,’ ‘bilingual speakers,’ or, from the dissatisfaction with the prior terms, ‘home background speakers,’ and ‘heritage language speakers’ (Valés, 2005: p. 412). There has not yet been a concise definition, however, that succinctly encapsulates the distinct features of HLLs. HLLs are different from L1 learners in that,...
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...HERITAGE ASSESSMENT LYNN BAKER GRAND CANYON UNIVERSITY: NRS 429 V MARCH 24, 2013 Culture is the foundation of all social distinctiveness and advancement. Culture heritage is the legacy that each generation receives and passes to the next generation. It includes all the aspects of a community’s past and present that is considered valuable and desires to pass on to future generations. People have different beliefs concerning health, illness, diseases, life and death; which are guided by cultural beliefs. This essay will discuss the usefulness of applying a heritage assessment in evaluating the needs of the whole person. Also, I will expound on interviews conducted with three cultural families with comparison differences in health tradition between these cultures on health maintenance, protection and restoration. One of the families to be discussed is the writer of this essay. Heritage assessment is an important step toward building cultural competency. This assessment tool consists of 29 questions that create a way to discuss a person’s beliefs regarding health, illness, spirituality, family support and personal values. The writer grew up in rural Mississippi, with two brothers and one sister in a single family home. We lived on a 65 acre farm surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins and maternal grandparents. Our ancestry consisted of African-Indian decent. In maintaining health, there were no foods forbidden to eat. Some of the foods eaten were meats, vegetables...
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...country has a unique common heritage or joint experience. Therefore culture can be defined as the complex system of values, traits, morals shared by society. All the choices we make reveal something about our personality, surrounding and our upbringing influences these choices. The way we speak, dress, the food we eat, the music we listen to tells allot about us and how we came to be. Everywhere we look in America we can see different cultural signs. But does America realy have a culture? A variety of different arguments have been put forward about this issue. Some people think that America has no culture, while other say that America definitely have its own, unique cultur. In this essay I will consider arguments for my opinion, about this issue. I will provide one of the mosto people opinion and summarize everything. Most of people say that America's culture is a combination of every culture in it, on it's own and combined with other cultures to make something new, out of something old. They have a diverse culture because the people are from different states. This is one of the things that make Americans culture interesting because of the beauty diversification that their culture has that helps them in uniting as opposed to bringing division. American culture is a Western culture, largely based on British culture with influences from other parts of Europe, the Native American peoples, African Americans and to a lesser extent Asian Americans and other young groups of immigrants...
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...In the essay, “Aria:Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood,” Richard Rodriguez exposes the readers to the nature of being bilingual and living in America. Richard Rodriguez not only emphasizes the sound of language but also the context behind it. Through his paragraphs, he goes into depth about the education system, the public, private, and intimacy language, and how much coming home has changed over the years for him. In his essay, “Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood”, Rodriguez uses anecdotes, strong arguments, and his own voice to successfully argue that bilingual education is impractical, and a child using their native language as well as English in school and public life is not needed. In the first chapter, Rodriguez talks about the struggles of growing up in a Mexican home but when he leaves his house, he enters a whole new world. Using anecdotes Rodriguez states, “I was a bilingual child, a certain kind - socially disadvantaged - the son of working-class parents, both Mexican immigrants” (Rodriguez 322). Rodriguez uses many anecdotes like this throughout the essay to persuade his readers that being bilingual isn’t an advantage. As a child it can be very difficult going to a school where English is the primary language, and so Rodriguez felt that his native language was one that was private. His language was not socially acceptable by others and so he felt that he was obligated to learn the public language which was English. And until he learned English he didn’t feel welcomed...
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...Se Habla Espanol. Student: Gonzalo Gomez. Professor: Dorothy, Valentine. Course Title: English Composition April 17, 2013 “ Se Habla Espanol” is one of the best essays I have read in my life time because I can relate a lot to it. This essay was written by Tanya Maria Barrientos. This essay will help you see the struggles she had to over come while growing up in The United States and not speaking Spanish her native Language. Mrs Barrientos was born in Guatemala and was raised in El Paso TX. When she was 3 years old her family brought her to The United States. Her parents decided that they were only going to speak English in her household. Her parents had decided that the only way her and her brother could fit-in in the Anglo society was by only speaking English regardless of their Hispanic appearance. She wrote about a time when her parents took her one week late to school because they were on vacation. “At the school's office the registrar frowned when they arrived.” She told them “ you people. Your children are always behind, and you have the nerve to bring them late?” I personally been through that similar situation during my school years while growing up. I love her mothers response when she says “ My children will be at the top of their classes in two weeks.” I bet that took the registrar off track. Since she was young she thought that speaking Spanish meant various things. One of the things was that Spanish meant being poor. Another thing was that it meant...
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...American Culture: A Medley of Food, Language, and Religion Bre McCauley COM/156 June 30, 2013 Sheri Jens American Culture: A Medley of Food, Language, and Religion I believe it was Marcus Garvey who said, and I quote, “a people without the knowledge of their past history, is like a tree with no roots.” You have to know where it is you came from, befriend that knowledge, and use what you know to move forward, to progress throughout life and make history based on your heritage. How many of us embrace our history? Never mind the pigmentation of our skin, or our style of dress, nor the way we wear our hair; keep in mind that being an American means that we are all influenced if not molded, by several other races who speak life into the way we communicate, the foods we eat, our interest in the arts, and even our beliefs of a higher power. As a child we are taught a variety of motor skills. The skills may include, but are not limited to, using our hands, crawling, walking, and of course speech. We are expected to mimic the sounds we hear from our moms, dads, siblings, teachers, and the world around us in order to communicate everything we see, hear and feel to whomever will listen. The power of language and communication is beyond words, in fact without language, how could we communicate? What is the value of communication without language? Well, according to martinfrost.ws “there are four major regional dialects ( A particular form of language that is peculiar to...
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