One day I woke up and my mom told me that we were moving to the United States. The first thing that came to my mind was that it was going to be hard to fit in for the culture and people were different. In the essay "Las Mañanita" the author, Elizabeth Rodriguez Kessler, talks about her experience of growing up and being raised in a bicultural family. She is a girl in search of her own identity. This young lady encounters many different stages in her life where she comes to the realization that she cannot keep both of her cultural backgrounds, the Latina and American culture, because at some point she leaves one behind. Her questioning of where she belongs begins when she first attends school. She then experiences a broken connection with her Latino heritage. She becomes greatly influence by the American Style. However, she manages to go back to her Latino background.
Flag of Hispanic America including also North Amer...
English: Institute of Hispanic/Latino Culture at t...
I'm No LatinoIt is hard to adapt to a new country without losing the identity that we might think we belong to, but how can we fit in if we do not want to be like everyone else.
First, for any Latino, studying in the United States is a wonderful experience and a great opportunity. However, for Rodriguez it was like a wake up call that she was different from the rest "I heard my principal, a young Incarnate Word nun turn the softness of Rodriguez into something foreign, unintelligible: Ra (a as in father) - dri ( i as in it) - geze (e as in cheese) with the accent on the last syllable" (9). Much like
Rodriguez, I too, heard my last name being pronounced with the American accent by one of my Spanish teachers back in high school. It was really...