Trapped by Two Cultures in Beets, Made You Mine, America, and Sangre 24 :: Cultural Identity Essays

Something that has always fascinated me is the confrontation with a all in all disparate tillage. We do not have to travel far to garner that plurality really lead different lives in other countries and that the truism Home sweet lieu often applies to most of us. What if we suddenly had to precede our homes and settle somewhere else, somewhere where other values and beliefs where common and where people spoke a different language? Would we still try to flux on to the old home by speaking our mother tongue, practising our own religion and culture or would we give in to the new and exciting country and eat up our past? And what would it be like for our children, and their children? In Identity Lessons - Contemporary piece of writing About Learning to Be the Statesn I found umpteen different stories telling us what it is like to be trapped among two cultures. In this short essay I aim to draw that belonging to two cultures can be very confusing. In Beets by Tiffany Midge we meet a family of four, where the mother is an Indian and the father is white. The eldest girlfriend learns about the Plains Indians and their culture in school, but the truth she is told there is different from the one her father wants to prove. Such mixed messages are also what the speaker system of Abraham Rodriguez Jrs The Boy Without a Flag receives. He refuses to salute the American flag, because his father keeps on talking about all the bad things America has done to their home Puerto Rico, and thus believes that he has done what is expected of him, but the father gets wrothful with him for jeopardizing his education and future. The boy feels as if the father has collaborated with the enemy and does not interpret how this could have happened. It took him until he had grown up to understand that the father save wanted what was best for him. In Made You Mine, America Ali Zarrin describes his coming to the USA as a teenager to study and find himself a better future. It was a engagement for him to cope with the differences from his native country in the Middle East America was to be the country of dreams and possibilities, but he had to realize it had the poor and dispossessed people as well.