Artifact Four: Immigration and Acculturation

When moving to a new country, you're moving into a new culture, and to fit in as best as possible you want to abide by that new culture. Things start to get hard when you feel like you've left your culture of oirigin behind. Do you identify yourself by your new home or your old one? No one wants to be an outsider, we all want to feel included and important. This is especially difficult for children, weather they're parents are immigrants of they are.

For imigrants to "fit in" in a new place they feel as of they must acculturate. Acculturation is "cultural modification of an individual, group, or people by adapting to or borrowing traits from another culture" (Miriam Webster Dictionary). In Reyna's situation there were large amounts of cultural differences and barriers. For instance the most basic, language, Reyna came to the United States knowing no English. In school she had to be separated from the rest of the class to learn the basics of English while the rest of the class, those who could speak English, were getting ahead. Another example of acculturation in Reyna's situation would be how the Grande family participated in American holidays; Christmas and Halloween. They stopped celebrating traditional Mexican holidays to move a few steps toward being Americans. One more example of the Grande family acculturating, is Mago asking to be called Maggie in school, she said it would be easier to fit in with a name people had heard of. These are all sacrifices the Grande family had to take to try to blend in culturally.

I found a short article written by a Chinese-Canadian, Mary Chan, who feels out of touch with her heritage and culture and recognizes herself as niether Canadian nor Chinese. She immigrated to Canada with her family when she was one year old, and since then became Canadian. Mary said she feels a little ashamed that she doesn't know much about her heritage and what it means to be Chinese. Mary said she hated the tension she felt between her "traditional upbringing at home" and the "overwhelming Western culture we are exposed to every day". Mary Chan says she doesn't think she will ever get over the feeling of "otherness", but at the same time she doesn't want to ignore her past.

My Opa didn't want his family to become American in fear of them losing their cultural identity and becoming the Mundane. Even to this day my Oma, who has lived in the U.S. most of her life, says she won't become a citizen because she doesn't want to let go of her Dutch culture. Oma always said she felt as if she always had one foot in each country, belonging to both and none at the same time. She would go back to the Netherlands to visit but feel out of sorts and changed. She felt the same way when she was in the U.S. at times, in one town my Oma lived in people would look at her and talk about her because she wasn't Polish or Catholic. No one wants to go through that. No one wants to be ostracized. This is why I think immigration should be easier and immigrants should be accepted and embraced everywhere in America.

My mother and her brother in Dutch costumes