As a member of a working class community, my life has been a struggle between resources and opportunities available for me. Having sparse resources has lead me to the constant push of working towards the things I’ve achieved. Social identities have become a guidance for my future goals and abilities. Being working class Latina, raised in a Catholic family has created many barriers and pathways into the future I wish to hold. Furthermore, taking all the social identities I have grew into have become the bases for my educational goals and identity. My primary social identity is a 1st generation female student. Despite the many identities I carry, I feel that being a 1st generation student is the most powerful and is the identity that describes …show more content…
I believe the title of a student is also very important, especially for the people around my social circle. Noting that I am a UCLA student describes a lot to my social circle back at home. Coming from a working class community, it means a lot to be a student, and most importantly, a student at UCLA. Being a UCLA student brings a lot of negative and positive stigma to friends and family back at home. What the majority of people from working class communities fail to acknowledge is the long stressful, tiredly, anxious feelings that come from being a dedicated student. The lack of exposure of education in working class communities revolves around constant judgment and misunderstandings. Many people will not understand when you have to say “no” to going out on a night of drinking, or rejecting the offer to a family reunion to finish studying for a midterm. It is difficult to explain to family members and friends that my education comes first. It is also difficult to constantly remain in a dedicated mindset to continue my education. The stigma behind the school name I carry brings a lot of stereotyping as well. Many people I grew up with
I am not white, but I am not Mexican either. I am, however, a first generation Mexican American with parents from San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Perhaps I do not know what it is like to cross the border that refrains me from being Mexican, or the color of my skin that refrains me from being white, but my own personal experiences make me the Mexican American that I am today. Growing up I celebrated the Fourth of July with fireworks, and the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe with matlachines.
This autobiographical essay will define my experience as a Dominican immigrant living in New York City. Being an American citizen with a Dominican background are extremely relevant to the process of political socialization. My family background is founded on the principles of democratic values, which taught to me by my mother and father. In New York City, I found a “melting pot” of different immigrants that allowed me to feel more accepted as a Dominican living in the United States. More so, these aspects of the socialization process provided a foundation for my belief in democratic values throughout my life.
Growing up in a family where my mom was a doctor and my dad was a musician, I was exposed to a lots of things in my life. For example I was able to see Broadway plays and and go on family trips to Disney every year in the winter. A lot of people would say I was very fortunate to be one of the family where I knew both my parents and they did there best to give me a lot of life experiences. But me being an African-American male it seems like I not supposed to how do experiences, I was supposed to not know my father not to be able to go on these trips with my family.
Growing up as Hmong-American youth, I was raised by a father who joined the military when he was twelve years old. He was forced into the Vietnam war fighting for safety, peace, and a relationship with the United States of America. Through this military influence and discipline at such a young age, my father accepted the military lifestyle. He carried it over from the Vietnam war to my family today. Growing up, my father was always strict on me, especially when it came to my appearances and education.
These students don’t get equal opportunities as those students attending elite schools. Authors Toni Cade Bambara and Jonathon Kozol have written vivid examples on how working class students have been impacted by segregation in school. Working class schools
I believe the term, hispanic, itself does not define who I am. I define who I am and who I want to become. However, I do come from a Mexican heritage. Coming from a Mexican heritage has influenced and deeply impacted my life. My heritage has taught me a lot.
From as early as I could remember I noticed I was not like the others kids. I had an interest for things most kids would not be interested in. I liked interacting with people, knowing about people and their life stories; I wanted to help in anyway that I could when I would hear everyone’s problems. I thought outside the box throughout my whole childhood and I wanted to make the most out of my knowledge. I told myself that I was going to dedicate my life to helping my community.
I come from an authentic Hispanic family, who is traditional in plenty distinct aspects. We treasure all the memories that have occurred to all of us and we laugh about the embarrassing moments we all had. We hold traditional customs and we accept new traditions as well. All of us are over protective of each and every family member, meaning that if anyone in the family has a problem we will not stop until it is fixed. To every family member, family is always first.
Day 2 Immigrant. That word gives me a label here. I am crossing the border to the U.S because my parents think it will give us a new beginning and a better life. I think they’re wrong. Our life in El Salvador was fine: We had a nice house and we were healthy.
I’m able to resonate with a plethora of things, yet the thing I consider my identity is I’m an adopted, Haitian immigrant. I was born in Haiti in 1998, in a small village in Thomazeau, I moved to Croix-des- Bouquets right after my birth and I lived there until I was 9 years old. My family's financial situation was adequate. My mom was always able to find a way to make ends meet. This cause our neighbor to be envious of us.
I identify as a Latina. I have always considered myself as a Latina, but throughout time, I believe that I have assimilated more into a white individual because of the privilege that I hold and because I have lived in the US most of my life. I have received mostly negative messages from those who are not from my ethnicity. My peers and I were told we wouldn’t graduate high school and be laborers for the rest of our lives. With the current politics, I believe that this still holds true where some people still hold stereotypes and give oppressing messages to Latinos.
I am very proud of my Hispanic heritage. Even though, I am an United States citizen, I am always going to belong to my Hispanic backgrounds. There are so many reasons that I am proud to be Guatemalan and American that I could write a whole book about it. However, I regularly participate in my Hispanic culture and community through my family, traditions, and by being bilingual.
I am an international student from Vietnam who came to the United States to pursue higher education. I was brought up in a very unique culture and family traditions, and this has had a strong influence on my beliefs and mindsets. Together with all the experiences that I have been through so far in my life, I have formed some social and personal identities that I might or might be aware of. Such identifies are an important tool that can stay with me and remind me every day of who I am and my origin.
In her ethnography account Women without Class, Julie Bettie explores the relationship that class along with race and gender work to shape the experiences of both Mexican American girls and white working class students. In her work, Bettie finds that class cannot only intersect to impact the school experiences of both working class and middle class girls, but also their transition to adulthood and their future outcomes. Thus, Bettie explores how working class girls are able to deal with their class differences by performing symbolic boundaries on their styles, rejecting the school peer hierarchy and by performing whiteness to be upwardly mobile. In women without class, Bettie describes the symbolic boundaries that both las chicas and the preps
Throughout my experiences in this course so far, I have had many opportunities to reflect on my own past and have begun to better understand my own cultural identity. It has been much more difficult to wrap my head around than I would have predicted it to be because so many things play into the construction of an identity that it can be hard to look at all of those separate pieces together. My cultural identity, like all others, is more complicated than it first appears. I identify as a white person, a woman, an American, a gay person, and a feminist, just to name a few. While all of these labels carry with them stereotypes and expectations, they also interplay with the cultural influences I was subject to throughout my childhood.