Personal Cultural Assimilation

Assimilation is a process that many immigrants go through when they move to a new society that has a culture that differs from their original one. When one assimilates they not only adopt new cultural beliefs and practices, but, more importantly, they lose the ones that they already had. Assimilation is a double-edged sword that helps enhance a person’s perspective and mixes cultures together so that eventually the one main culture of a society is a conglomeration of many other different cultures. At the same time, culture is a significant part of a person, to lose a culture is a tragedy that mirrors that of losing a part of one’s soul. The decision, whether conscious or unconscious, of assimilating or even refusing to assimilate can forever change a person and how they view the world around them.
Like many others before me, by moving to the United States, I was able to experience assimilation first hand. I was born in Brazil, where I was raised with Brazilian culture and did not have much contact with any other culture until my family moved to America when I was ten years old. Because of that, I experienced …show more content…
After all, I was only ten years old and I think everyone can agree that kids can be mean, especially if someone is different. Understandably enough, fitting in was very important to me. So what if I had to stop acting the same way I had acted throughout my entire life? It is amazing to see what people, especially children, are willing to do just to fit in. Similarly, moving away from home as a child took a massive emotional toll on me. It broke my heart to be leaving home, so when I got here to avoid constant suffering I had to do my best to forget my life in Brazil, which made it really hard to keep contact with Brazilian culture. As I grew older things only got worse because as time passed by I thought less and less of Brazil, my family, and the way that I was