To some, being Hispanic means being a statistic, being a minority, a group you need to appeal to to gain votes, immigrants escaping political persecution, wars, economic instability, entering the country illegally and taking Americans’ jobs. Being Latina means your parents put your happiness over theirs, because the family’s well-being is more important than just their own well-being. By this I mean that after all, my family legally moved to the United States so that we could be together (my dad had been living in the US before marrying my mom and starting a family with her), they wanted me to get a good quality education, and to that once out of college I could have a better chance into obtaining a job and living comfortably. In the Dominican
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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