My Life As A Hispanic Woman

Life as a Hispanic woman can be summed up with two words; a telenovela. In modern telenovelas, the audience gets hit with stereotypical factors such as the modest heroine achieving success, a typical love story, evil stepmothers, long lost siblings and the icing on the cake is drama. I would describe my life as a Latina in close range to those cheesy telenovelas I watched growing up, well maybe except for the evil stepmother. Growing up Hispanic is a point of pride for us and throughout the ups and downs, those experiences made me the woman I am today. Despite the fact that this is my telenovela, it wouldn’t be here to tell it if my parents never found their way to New York City. My mother was born in Puerto Rico and she was number ten …show more content…
My family grows more every year which means more and more names to remember and I highly doubt I’ll ever meet all of them since there’s that many. On my father’s side, counting all the cousins, nieces, and nephews, I would probably end up like the count of Sesame Street. My father was the only one out of the Salcedo’s to actually migrate to the United States so I grew up mostly as a Puerto Rican. Most of my mother’s side of the family migrated from Puerto Rico to New York, Philadelphia, and Florida but just because we’re in different states doesn’t mean there isn’t a party. The house was never quiet and there was constant music which varied from any genre. I grew up on Arroz con gandules, flan, pastelles, any type of meat but preferably pernil and these items were always found during parties that were often hosted at my aunt’s house. Although now things are different and the family has become more divided due to drama, it made me who I am today because it made me embrace my …show more content…
Being Hispanic, there is a constant need to feel like you can amount to anything just like everyone else. I struggled for a long time academically because I didn’t care about school and thought of it as a joke because I wholeheartedly believed that I would never amount to be anything. Throughout high school, I failed my classes, didn’t show up to class, wouldn’t participate or do anything that was beneficial to my future. When I entered my Junior year, I decided that I needed to take initiative and start caring about my future because I knew that no one was going to do the job for me. I began picking up my grades and slowly but surely I changed my grade point average from an embarrassing 55 to a 90. I went from being minutes away from dropping out, to be able to walk at my graduation. Just like the heroine in my favorite novelas, I managed to make the impossible happen but my bad choices caught up to me when attending college so I had to go to the only college I was accepted to which was College of Staten