Being a Cuban immigrant has provided me with a unique bicultural perspective that has become my support system in the United States. For the first eleven years of my life, my culture was composed of music and dancing. In every street corner of my hometown, there was a group of seniors playing domino and close by, their grandchildren dancing to the Salsa music being played on the radio to pass the time. The hardships created by the communist regime are overshadowed by memories of my mother teaching me how to sew and by my paternal grandmother teaching me how to enjoy a strong Cuban coffee.
Three paramount traits needed to survive any life or death situation are bravery, knowledge, and perseverance. Characters in the story Most Dangerous Game, the movie Castaway, and even people in the article “The Migrant Crisis” will show us why all of these traits are good to have in survival situations.
Cisneros's story focuses on how different she feels from her Mexican culture, comparing and contrasting her
I have lived in two different worlds. The duality of the immigrant experience is a battle that every first-generation child has to wage. As I conquered my language barrier, a whole new world full of traditions and customs opened up. Seeking acceptance from my peers, it was hard not to adopt their culture and ignore my own in the process. However, abandonment was not an option in a family with a strong cultural identity. While there was nothing wrong with either culture, finding middle ground proved to be an ongoing journey.
In Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, he explains how powerful exile plays an important role in the narrator’s journey to finding out who he really is. According to Edward Said “Exile is… a rift forced between a human being and a native place,…its essential sadness can never be surmounted…a potent, even enriching” .The narrator’s journey to finding who he is, was alienating and enriching.
The reality of life can often differ from childhood to adulthood. Twelve-year-old Pablo Medina experienced this first hand. In the reflective essay, “Arrival: 1960,” Medina tells about his experiences of moving from Cuba to America. Upon arriving, his expectations for America are set high. Coming from the communism he saw in Cuba, Medina was expecting a land of freedom, apart from violence, and segregation; he was expecting an overall better life for himself. After just a few days of being in New York, the young boy was exposed to the harsh realities of his new life in America.
But this is not a new story. My own great-grandparents left Russia and eastern Europe for the US around the beginning of the 20th century. Jews didn’t have an easy time in tsarist Russia and, certainly by contemporary standards, they were a persecuted, oppressed minority. Equally, it would be naive to think that they weren’t in large part motivated by the desire to build a better, more prosperous life in the US. The same is probably true for many of today’s migrants: both push and pull factors are at
On April 16th, 2009, President Obama soothed the travel ban and allowed Cuban- American to travel freely to Cuba. In 2014, it was announced that Obama wanted to re-open relations with Cuba. In 2015, restrictions for US citizens to travel to Cuba was lighten which allowed travel to the country. But this was just strictly for missionary work and education. Visits for tourism was still banned. The two presidents, President Obama and President Castro met in April, 2015. This was the first meeting between the two countries in over 50 years. Several American companies was granted access to travel through ferry between Florida and Cuba. Still, the travel for tourism still remains
Like all social identities, there is no fixed European identity. Today we have overcome the monolithic conception of it in favour of a more postmodern definition, understanding it as something fluid or constantly in the process of becoming. Ideas of Europe and about Europe are in close relationship with the historical context and as such they ought to be studied, so that a diachronic understanding can facilitate a synchronic analysis. Paul Valéry’s essay “The Crisis of the Mind” fits well in this framework: the crisis is a crisis of conscience, it’s the awareness that the understanding of the world that once was is no more. Thus, it is an important example of a turning point in the history and evolution of Europe’s identity (or at least of
Lost, a word that carries a heavy and negative connotation while also hefting unique experiences and emotions for each person, with the main common point between them being the act of having something or someone taken from their lives. In the short story, “confusing the Saints,” by Ana Menéndez, the female protagonist faces grief, anger, and acceptance due to the loss of her husband, while simultaneously bringing in her culture involving Santeria and her life in both Cuba and America. This character leads to the question of what are the psychological and physical effects of losing a loved one and how one copes with loss.
Immigrant lives in both Fruit of the Lemon and ‘reality’ hardships mostly share similar endurance. Many immigrants are stuck in two different cultures; their original culture and the new culture that they adopt in a new place. However, some immigrants only have a chance to adopt a new culture. Some immigrant family’s children were born in a country other than their native country. In Fruit of the Lemon, Faith is a person who lived her whole life without her native culture which was hard for her to understand her fellows race. Yet, she could not stands watching her people get hurt in front of her. Before going to Jamaica, where she clears her mind about the confusion, she had about the whole culture problem that led to her depression, she was
The progressive era in the early twentieth century was a period of severe social and economic inequality. Progressivism was a reaction to a variety of problems that were becoming more known to the public. It was a time in which many Americans found themselves between class lines and often felt a loss of identity. McGerr a professor of history at the University of Indiana explains the “four quintessential progressive battles: to change other people; to end class conflict; to control big business; and to segregate society” At the same time the great wealth and prosperity for the “upper ten” was being noticed throughout the country. Social and economic hardship combined with the rise of big business and corruption in politics is what started the “fierce discontent” felt by so much of the population at the time.
In the nineteenth century, the United States was regarded for being the land of opportunity and shelter for immigrants. For many immigrants, the promise of not having to withstand the pressures of political, economic, and religious persecution in Europe helped boost thousands of people to come to the coast of Staten Island. Despite what the Americans conceived their roles towards immigrants to be, the perception of the immigrants to the real story of how they survived in America does not support the claim that America is a land of opportunity and shelter.
At the heart of a person‘s life lies the struggle to define his self, to make sense of who he is? Diaspora represents the settling as well as unsettling process. While redesigning the geopolitical boundaries, cultural patterns, it has also reshaped the identities of the immigrants with new challenges confronting the immigrant in negotiating his identity. Diaspora becomes a site where past is given a new meaning and is preserved out of intense nostalgia and longing. The novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid is significant in its treatment of the issues faced by immigrants in the diaspora. Mohsin Hamid has grounded his resistance narrative in the identity narrative and through the prism of identity offers a deep insight into the American society and its ideals. The novel exposes the ugly side of the American society with its fundamentalist institutions and dislodges the narratives of fundamentalism as a Muslim monopoly and inverts the myths and discourses on identity to produce a counter narrative.
This world has been going through globalization for thousands of years. Just as the current globalization happening so as to the number of people migrating every year. Each year millions of people migrated from their country and relocate in a new place aside from their home country. There are different kind of reasons people are migrated from one place to another. Apart from immigrants, workers, marriages, and many other migrating groups of people, students known as international students are taking their education abroad.