While in the DR, I walked every Saturday about half a mile, with my mom to institute where I was learning English. Since I only went once I week, I was very proficient in the language, so when I started attending school in the US I was placed in ELL classes. A year later I was promoted to mainstream classes, but once you think you have mastered this new language, others bully you for having an accent. However, what they don’t know is that behind that accent, there’s a story: they don’t know the struggles I had to go through to learn the language, they don’t know that this accent is the result of knowing a different culture, a different world. It means living amidst two different cultures, not totally fitting in one or the other. Societies are constantly changing, so when I go for vacation the DR the way my cousins speak, the songs the talk about and even the jokes they make, are foreign to me. It means hearing people talk about The Fresh Prince of Belair in school and being the only person not participating in the conversation. All in all, being Hispanic means different things to different people, but for me, it means having a close relationship to my family, being able to navigate through two different worlds, yet not fitting in in neither
While in the DR, I walked every Saturday about half a mile, with my mom to institute where I was learning English. Since I only went once I week, I was very proficient in the language, so when I started attending school in the US I was placed in ELL classes. A year later I was promoted to mainstream classes, but once you think you have mastered this new language, others bully you for having an accent. However, what they don’t know is that behind that accent, there’s a story: they don’t know the struggles I had to go through to learn the language, they don’t know that this accent is the result of knowing a different culture, a different world. It means living amidst two different cultures, not totally fitting in one or the other. Societies are constantly changing, so when I go for vacation the DR the way my cousins speak, the songs the talk about and even the jokes they make, are foreign to me. It means hearing people talk about The Fresh Prince of Belair in school and being the only person not participating in the conversation. All in all, being Hispanic means different things to different people, but for me, it means having a close relationship to my family, being able to navigate through two different worlds, yet not fitting in in neither