Personal Narrative: Enhancing My Roots

I am a twenty three year old American citizen with a Latino racial background. I grew up in a Hispanic community all my life where my neighborhood lacked racial diversity. I attended church where the custom language spoken during service was in Spanish. Local Hispanic neighbors owned the stores we shopped at and the food courts we ate at. To say the least, I felt comfortable in my neighborhood.

The place that shaped me, made me, created what I am is located in the heart of Santa Ana. A predominantly Latino neighborhood caused my environment to become different to that of the rest of the world. Unlike most neighborhoods in which everyone speaks English and are legally in the country my case was different. Most of the neighborhood population was illegal and almost no one there spoke English except for those who attended school. I would look out my kitchen window and I would observe the black and white car drive by every hour checking on the neighborhood.

Heritage     Throughout the world there are millions of languages and cultures that can be found in even the smallest parts of the smallest countries.  With so many cultures around the world, there is no doubt that every person comes from an ethnic background, whether they are just one race or are more than one race.  These cultures and languages are often passed down through generations of family.  My entire family’s ethnic background is Indian for as far as I can trace it back to.  From my great-grandparents to my little cousins, we all are Indian and our culture and language was passed down from the elderly to all of my younger relatives, who, like me, are still learning our language, food, and cultural values of India from our family.

Coming from A Mexican family, I along with my siblings are the first generation to have been born in the United States. As a child, I lived a great life. My only worries were of missing the paleteros, ice cream man, or being frustrated because nobody in my neighborhood wanted to buy my mud pies, but never was it that I would fear the fact that my family could be taken away. It wasn’t until I was older and heard more comments about there being a thing as “illegal” immigrants when I began to worry for my parents, however, at the same time I began to realize all the suffering and challenges they go through and have gone through to give my siblings and I the best life we can get. Immigrants are an important part of America, yet they don’t get the awareness they deserve.

My thematic pathway consists of three classes: Introduction to Music, Introduction to Sociology, and Digital System. The first two classes were taken in John Jay College and the last one was taken in my first semester at Buffalo University. These classes come together to qualify my global pathway under the topic of Design and the Build Environment. Nevertheless, I am still not sure how they assimilated into this topic to develop our critical thinking skill and analytical skill to approaches the problem solving as how it descripted on the website. Furthermore, it really gives me a tough time to make these classes echoed each other.

What vision do you have of yourself ten years from now? I see myself in the National Basketball Association (NBA) getting money and living the good life. I know it will be tough because life is not easy. I will have to work harder than others to get recognized. I will face a lot of tough obstacles, but I know my main three obstacles.

My cultural product is a sorority pin. This pin is in the shape of a pyramid. It is made of gold and has blue sapphires. The sorority I joined at theUniversity of Rhode Island gave me this pin at my initiation. When I joined the sorority, Ienvisioned myself at the very top of the pyramid, the smallest part because I am a minority.

The threshold goblin stood before me, between me and the end of my quest. “You are small, you are weak, you know nothing!” He screeched. My blood started to boil and my anger built. I shouted back, “That’s not true!

Goals for this year My goals for this year i wanna get good grades. I also wanna start on the junior high football team. When basketball comes around I wanna be the starting shooting guard. I wanna have good relationships with my teachers.

Four years ago I never would’ve contemplated I’d be here writing this essay. Four years ago I never would’ve thought I’d be where I am today. In my first year of high school I started hanging around the wrong people, I was defying my parents and I was even put on probation for truancy from where I had been ditching a lot of school. Probation was one of my most substantial failures. I let my school and parents.