Essay On Culture In Pat Mora's Legal Alien

When you make a choice, how is it influenced? The answer is simple. Culture. A person’s culture always affects their views of others and the world because of the expectations their culture places upon them, their cultural biases towards other cultures, although sometimes a person’s culture doesn’t show an impact of what they choose and think. First off, a person’s culture places expectations upon them, affecting their views on everything, such as in “Two Kinds”, where an angry Chinese mother lost it and a violent fit of rage when her daughter wasn’t meeting their culture’s expectations. By incorporating the expectation of being a prodigy, the mother played a very large expectation upon the daughter, this affects her view by showing she

There are many examples of this idea within multiple texts and resources. In the poem “Legal Alien”, by Pat Mora, the speaker was criticized for being a part of an opposing culture. The author says,” viewed by Anglos as exotic, perhaps inferior, definitely different,” and gives the implication that while the speaker is part of the American culture, she isn’t accepted because she also associates with the Mexican culture. This shows that the American culture produces people that resent Mexicans, only because of where they come from. Another example of where cultures put biases in place can be seen in the essay “Where Worlds Collide” by Pico Iyer. The author states, “Heads still partly in the clouds, bodies still several time zones - or centuries - away, and they step into the Promised Land.” The bias that is being shown here is that other cultures perceive the American culture to be a culture that lets you follow your dreams and find many opportunities to make a living. While some of the restrictions placed upon civilians are as strict as their previous countries’, the restrictions in place are much different. This shows that a culture can create their own bias for others to look at, giving people to think certain things about the culture they are living