Create a blog for this week that relates something you read about or watched from this week to your everyday world. This is blog #4, please label it blog #4.
The section that I choose to comment on from this weeks assignment is Gloria Anzaldua's work and her reflections of growing up in a biethnical world. Reading these reflections from Gloria really hit home and stirred up some mixed emotions within me.
As I am of mixed ethnicity, but predominately raised in the Mexican culture due to my father's family vast numbers and my mother being an only child, I have experienced similar language transitions while interacting within separate collections of people. One day I will be at a immediate family gathering and use about 2-3 unique versions of Spanish to communicate among the elders (from Mexico), cousins and friends (1st Gen. born in US) and the younger generation (2nd Gen in US)
Also even though I have never experience "straight out right ignorant" racist remarks directed towards my decision to communicate in Spanish outside of the family walls, quite few of my cousins have expressed being involved and "being corrected" by school admins, councilers, and those holding tax paying jobs that are supposibly their to help and guide our youth, but instead are oppressing and imposing their descriminating ideology and raciest views on innocent, malleable, young minds.
Well let me quit now before I get up and start a riot, but as others outside of the multi-ethnical world would assume that those of us that from families who's parents are from other countries and express very stong ties to their culture, its not easy having to grow up having two identies to follow and being expected to be great in each of them when it comes to language, traditional values, and cultural norms.
joel...thank you, thank you for sharing! What you went through is exactly the legacy of the Spanish Conquest...you are syncretism, mestizo, convergence that we have continually talked about thus far...but what you describe , similar to Anzaldua, is the difficulty attached to it. The blending together is not simple, not logical, not painless...many would suggest that bringing together necessitates taking something away. It is one thing when it is you deciding what it is you one to take away, repress, it is another thing when someone outside of you that forces you to make those choices for you.
ReplyDeleteThank you..I do really hope you continue to share as your thoughts and feedback will be so incredibly vital to the class.