Personal Experience: Moving To The United States

Cultural barriers Education is the key to a successful life, many have fought for this right. While achieving this goal the most common opposing factor is language. In “Learning to Read” excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, expresses his struggle for education while incarcerated. He believes that by learning proper advanced English he and his people will achieve a greater understanding and will learn about their cultural ancestry. In “Spic in English” Victor Villanueva is confronted with a language barrier and overcomes it without losing his culture.

I am Puertican and Cuban, but I never got the chance to learn about my culture or how to speak Spanish. This is because my mom only learned some Spanish but she never learned about our culture. She didn’t because her grandmother wasn’t fond of her dad, so she was never accepted on her mom's side of the family. Even today my mom is sad she never got to bond with her mom's family and wishes she could have had the ability to learn and embrace her family's culture. Unfortunately, many people go through this but more often than not their not being accepted in the U.S. because they don’t speak English.

Throughout my entire life, I think the most significant challenge I have faced is immigrating to America. I spent thirteen years of my life in the Philippines and then all of a sudden, I have to leave everything behind to face a different world from what I grew up with. What was difficult about moving to this new country involved everything from learning new values to settling down on a whole new environment. I had to face the reality of a diverse society and deal with the conflicts that comes with the different cultural values that come along with it.

The flood of immigration in the early 1900s created a country where cultures from around the world were being blended with americanization. Jewish and Italian immigrant women in the late nineteenth century moved to New York, and practiced cultural coalescence in their transition to America. Cultural coalescence is taking multiple cultures and blending them together into one. This blending includes keeping old traditions, creating new tradition, and a mixture of new and old. These women learned how to blend their old traditions in Europe with new traditions in America.

Challenge Essay Moving into The United States that has a different language has been the biggest obstacle that I have ever faced, especially with the fact that there was a time where I didn’t understand a single word of that language called English. This was a big obstacle in my life since I was raised in Mexico where the prime language, there is Spanish and that was the only language I knew back then, it was until the day had come where my family and I had to move into the United States due to the violence that has been happening in Mexico. I consider those times the most difficult ones of my whole life because I had to work triple than what I normally did in school in order for me to learn a huge complex language.

Francis had to experience many different things when moving to America. Any person from another country that speaks a different language would have trouble in a new place. I am going to tell you about the changes you have to make to come in a different placed. The hardest thing to get used to is the language; everything is more difficult when you don’t know the language. Even to get a job is harder you might not know what your boss is asking and get fired.

instead I was tossed a red bag of orange triangles that looked completely inedible. I was confused to say the least. It hit me then that although we both speak English, there was still a barrier. School was no better. Although I was adjusting, I became tired of being treated like a parrot, repeating words back while people listened in amazement.

The first eight years of my life, I spent in India where I was born. Growing up I was constantly reminded by my parents that I needed to make them proud by getting a good job and living a good lifestyle. They told me this because they did not want to see me live a hard life like they did. When I was nine years old, I moved from India to the United States of America. The reason why I moved to America was not because I was living a bad life in India, it was so that I could have a better education and more opportunities in life.

Being born and raised in a culture and then uprooting your life to pursue opportunities in a different culture can be hard in three ways. First, speaking a foreign language and then coming to America where majority of the people speak English can be difficult to adapt to. When a person has grown accustomed to speaking their native language, it can be problematic to have to pick up an entire new language. Possibilities can be limited because of the restrictions on one’s ability to communicate with other. Second, if a teenager comes to America from a foreign country they will have to take on responsibilities that they normally would not.

At first, the social peculiarity given to me by my migration status and language limitations made me a victim of bullying, which made me want to go back to the safety and similarity of my home country. However, the persistent nature engraved in me by my parents did not allow me to give in to the constant discriminatory voices that kept telling me that I would never be "American" enough.

Learning another language was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Being an immigrant is not easy because I am in a foreign country that is not mine. I came to the States with my younger brother and had to start from the beginning. When I imagined coming to the States, I pictured Hollywood, famous actors, the best fast food, and of course- the “American Dream”. I soon realized that this was only glamorized in movies and far from the truth.

As I ponder over my life, each memory seems identical to the other, and I find myself drifting through a reality of similar events that generate the same memories and emotions. Looking back further into my childhood includes memories of my homeland. I remember entering a new world at the age of five, where all of my later memories would be formed. This was when my family moved to the United States from Peru, my native country in the South. The complete change in culture and values truly impacted me when I first moved to Florida, and I reflect over the significant effect it has had on my character during the last thirteen years of my life.

Coming from a low income family, living in a small town in India, I learned early on about struggling and surviving those struggles. I watched my parents working day and night to provide for electricity, pay for our monthly school fees so my sister and I can have a better education, and for the future they wished upon for their children. To further enhance this vision, my father decided for the family and I to immigrate to the US. Everything was different in the sense that I changed schools, learned a new language, had to make new friends, and learned the different culture. I had to adapt to a whole new world, which was a little difficult at 6 years old

I myself grew up as the daughter of two Vietnamese immigrants in a family of even more immigrants; my older sister was the only one who knew how to speak English. Due to this, I had grown up with Vietnamese as my first language and English as my second, so when put into school it proved to be very difficult for me. It was not because the school standards were too hard or that I did not have enough help, but rather it was because I had never been exposed to these skills that my peers had been exposed to. These standards felt impossible for me to reach, but easily attainable to my native-born peers. Also, going to school with poor English and being in ELL, I was not able to make any friends and asking for guidance was hard.

I had to go to school even though I did not speak the English. I was in a special program called ESOL, this program help me to learn the language and be able to complete all my middle school and high school classes. When I graduated high school, I decided to join the military. This event had the most effect on my life, it lead me to be the person that I am today.