Late 20th Century Immigrants In America

Moving to a new country with a completely different culture than your own is very challenging to families. Adapting to a new culture and trying to raise kids with the new culture but still have them know about the other culture is extremely difficult. Moving to a new place forces people to eat new food, learn new sayings, and get a new and maybe different job just to fit in. It also doesn’t help that a lot of families are poor and have to start from scratch and try to make enough money. In “ Daughter of Invention,” the author shows that adapting to a different culture is challenging and is hard on families.

Am I Mexican or American? This is one of the preeminent problems faced by children who are growing up with two different cultures.

Both during and after moving to a new country, immigrants face many hardships. The process of obtaining citizenships is difficult in itself, but even when citizenship is earned there are still challenges. One major difficulty some immigrants may face is dealing with xenophobia. Immigrants who experience xenophobic prejudice can find adjustment to a new life very difficult. In contrast, those who are treated with kindness and as equal citizens find assimilating to a new culture easier. The way immigrants are treated in America impacts their success as citizen. In addition, one of the ways a former immigrant might feel like they have become a “fully-fledged citizen” is when they feel as though they belong and are integrated into the country they’ve come to.

Culture is one of the main factors that allow people to be different from one another. When immigrants come to America, they realize that it can be hard to adapt to the American culture. Dr. Rose Ihedigbo’s “Sandals in the Snow” and Amparo B Ojeda’s “Growing Up American: Doing the Right Thing” are both stories that tell how their adjustment from their homeland to America was different.

It’s hard to believe that in America, a country founded by immigrants, new-comers are still struggling to integrate successfully into American society. My parents, like many other immigrants, were faced with a number of struggles upon arriving in America: a new language, new culture, and new endeavors, [on top of finding work]. Growing up in this environment, I became aware of how weak English skills can serve as a barrier to separate immigrants from American society. The immediate struggle immigrants face is to provide for their families- have to juggle integrating into american society (learning language, etc.) while having a steady income

Cultural literacy is a somewhat transparent concept that has been around for long time. This means that people from all over the world have used this form of literacy and not been aware of it. Cultural literacy is simply defined as having common everyday knowledge about another culture or your own. Some examples of common cultural knowledge would be who the current president is, what a famous landmark is commemorating, or even what is the best song out at the moment. Being culturally literate can help a person in getting a certain job and in making social connections. However, cultural literacy is not always helpful to the people not belonging to that particular culture. Depending on the educational or social opportunities available, he or

In the article entitled “Finding the Bicultural Balance: Immigrant Latino Mothers Raising ‘American’ Adolescents” by Yolanda Quinones-Mayo and Patricia Dempsey, Quinones- Mayo and Dempsey discuss the barrier between immigrant mothers and their “American” adolescents because the American society teaches the adolescents to become independent from their mothers (2). The article itself presents the social work analysis of the relationship between the mother and child respectively based off the Latino culture, as well as the adaptiveness of the adolescent to American culture. Specifically, Quinones-Mayo and Dempsey argue that the strain in the relationship between immigrant mothers and their “Americanized” children is caused by American idealism.

“One of the greatest glories of the public school was its success in Americanizing immigrants” Christakis quoted Ravitch in paragraph 20 is what surprised me because I have never heard of this concept before. Personally, I believe that would depend on the student. For example, one of my friends is from the Democratic Republic of Congo (Africa) and at first she was not really Americanized, like she did not use slang, she was not procrastinating. But, as time went on she made more American friends and became accustomed to America that was when she did start using slang and procrastinating. I agree with Christakis when she said “public schools also provide students with crucial exposure to people of different backgrounds and perspectives.” It

Undocumented children feel abandoned by their parents after their departure. The children feel remorse of the parent’s actions. The children do not understand the risk that their parents made.After divorce, American parents behave just like undocumented immigrants in the way of abandoning their children for their new families. Similarly, Americans should realize that these undocumented immigrants come to the United States to help their families back in their original homes.

In the current political climate of the United States, immigration is an extremely hot topic. Every single person – qualified or not - thinks they have something of worth to add to the heated debate, leading to some increasingly polarized views across the nation. From the day of its founding, America has been a country based on an idealized diverse and multicultural society where every single person is free to be exactly who they want to be. If the government legislated English as the national language, the multicultural and multilingual society the States worked so hard for will be driven multiple steps backward in the process.

I can point to several experiences in my life that have been critical in shaping my current gender role conformity. Having been raised in a matriarchal family structure, I was imbued from an early age with the idea of women as equal to men and simultaneously powerful and strong in their own way. My mother, who worked full-time while completing her associate’s and bachelor’s degree, was the primary achiever and breadwinner in our nuclear family. Rather than babysitters or preschool, I was raised by my grandmother, who cared for each and every one of her grandchildren, and in this I was taught to view her as the matriarch. As the oldest living member of our family lineage, my great-grandmother was respected and revered. In these ways, I think

“Many immigrants and refugees have endured significant hardships in their native countries, including poverty, war trauma, persecution and rape," says clinical psychologist Dennis Hunt. "But few may have anticipated the stress on their families that was waiting for them in the United States.

involve their children in their native customs and traditions, and instill the values of the home country in their children. However, children are more interested in learning about the country they reside in and assimilating to that culture. This is so that they can fit in with their peers. The pressure to fit in among their peers, especially as a minority growing up in the United States, can place great strain on the children. Often times what is normal in one culture is deemed as strange in another. The children must then decide which culture they want to partake in or learn how to separate the two. In the novel, The Namesake, Gogol Ganguli faces a similar first generation immigrant child identity crisis. The author, Jhumpa Lahiri, emphasizes

Often times when families immigrate to new countries they encounter some negative changes in their family dynamics. Whether they chose to move away or were forced to move for some negative reason, there is a high possibility that that will lose not only their social networks, but their cultural identities as well (Renzaho, McCabe, & Sainsbury, 2011). Many refugee parents with teenage children find increasing difficulties when their children are able to assimilate at a much faster pace to the new culture then they are. They begin to experience a power shift as the children become more quickly accustomed and the parents struggle to preserve their own cultural values within their children (Renzaho et al., 2011). The parents feel as though they need to rely on their child to get by due to their encounters with discrimination and devaluation. Language barriers, gender roles, and cultural differences in raising children can greatly impact the parent-child relationship when forced to move (Deng & Marlowe, 2013). For this study,

Often when first-generation immigrants come to America, they make little effort to assimilate into American culture and do their utmost to retain their customs and languages. In contrast, many second-generation immigrants find it necessary to discard the culture that had been preserved in the home for biological descent does not ensure feelings of cultural identity.