Immigrant Children
This week, I met Sarah De Los Santos, a reserved, ten-year-old from the northern edge of Mexico bordering the state of New Mexico. Sarah kept to herself for much of our first interraction, answering questions politely but with not much elaboration. Yet she still shared enough for me to get a glimpse of her childhood. She moved to Cincinnati with her family from a small Mexican town when she was six. With only four years of immersion, she is now fluent in English and exhibits no distinct hispanic accent unless speaking her native tongue. She has fully adapted to life in America and seems to have a sense of belonging. She seems self-conscious of herself and of her schoolwork, a sentiment probably amplified by a perception of being part of a minority especially in a school clearly established for international students. To relate to the concept of Sarah's immigration, I have included a picture (below) of other immigrant children all clinging to their matching backpacks. The backpacks themselves are a staple of American schoolchildren and represent an immigrant's need to adapt to American culture and lifestyle the way Sarah has done.
Sarah and I clearly experienced incredibly different upbringings, from what I can infer from our first interraction. I was born and raised in a suburb of Chicago, while she went from a small town to an urban city in a completely different country. While my family moved a lot before I was born, I have never moved houses or towns, while she has had her whole world turned by being immersed in a completely different culture and forced to learn a new language. My comfortable, undisturbed upbringing mixed with a naturally extroverted personality contributed to me being a very outgoing, sometimes goofy ten-year-old, always eager to participate in class and meet other kids. Below is a photo of "suburbia," the quintessential American suburban town which I believe paints the picture of my hometown.
Week Three
Prejudice and Discrimination
I have learned through psychology readings that when taking standardized exams, minority students are likely to perform less strongly if they are asked their race before taking the exam. This has to do with the effect prejudice and stereotypes have on people and the concept of self-prejudice. This concept is especially relevant in the United States where diversity is much greater than in less developed nations. Sarah's shyness could potentially be related to a feeling of self-prejudice given the setting of our introduction. When I met her, I was the educated, well-dressed, nineteen-year-old white girl walking into the Academy of Multilingual Immersion Studies with twenty other caucasian students like myself. That in itself sets a scene of not only superiority in age and grade level, but the relation of that to race, even if the relation is only made subconsciously.
When I was Sarah's age, I attended a diverse grade school comprised of a mix of caucasian, Hispanic, Asian, and African American students. While prejudice was addressed as a social issue, I did not see that many of my classmates exhibited racial prejudice. Social groups were established generally on the basis of personalities and extra-curricular interests. Most of my friends throughout grade school, in fact were Asian or Hispanic Americans. They would occasionally make "white girl" jokes about me, but it was always in jest and I never felt like an outsider. Similarly, our school was racially mixed enough that the subject of prejudice was never taken very seriously because it rarely was visible.
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