Analysis Of Leave Your Name At The Border By Manuel Munoz

In the countries of immigrants like the united States, people from different cultural backgrounds bring their own cultures and traditions to live and work together and in the normal situation, one kind of culture will hold a dominant position. It is good for the people who have the dominant cultural background. However, that makes people from other cultural backgrounds confuse, especially for second or third generations. For these people, cultural assimilation and retroculturation are two necessary processes. They will influence non-dominant culture of people and their next generations. In Manuel Munoz’s work “Leave Your Name At The Border”, he points out the cultural assimilation by discussing the changing of Hispanic people’s names. Name …show more content…
They are able to mix aspects of their old culture with aspects of the new culture, which changes their lifestyle. They are also able to live partially as a foreigner, but partly as a native, which opens their minds to different customs. People are able to unite different features from the two cultures to create a new set of rules to live by. While one’s sense of self-definition is not changed, the way that he or she thinks is different. Assimilating to a new culture may add new factors to how a person thinks, but it does not change who they ultimately are. Munoz says that “but instead of recognizing the need for fluency in both languages, we turned it into a peculiar kind of battle, English was for public display, Spanish was for privacy—and privacy quickly turned to shame”(Munoz 309). Although Munoz can change his name into an American-way name to get used to the life in a different culture, the feeling of being assimilated never totally came to him. He still lives in the concern of losing his own identity in the culture he born in. He learned to use two languages in different occasion, but the cultural conflict confuses him of how to redefine his identity, and it swiftly became a burden for him to face his own culture, which actually will cause the loss of culture. Since the original culture is regarded as the root of …show more content…
Some people adapt all the new culture and some people adapt part of the new culture and mix it with their original culture, therefore produce new lifestyle for the community. During the process of being assimilated, people redefine their identities as native or still foreigners as how they accept the new culture. Both activities are seeking the way to keep balance between two different cultures and spread their traditions by the way. Cultural assimilation is a beneficial action both for individuals and the