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 completely divergent culture. We do not throw off to travel far to realize that tribe really lead different lives in other countries and that the saying phratry sweet home often applies to most of us. What if we suddenly had to leave our homes and slump somewhere else, somewhere where other values and beliefs where common and where volume round a different language? Would we still try to hang 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 forget our preceding(a)? And what would it be like for our children, and their children? In Identity Lessons - Contemporary Writing or so Learning to Be American I found many different stories telling us what it is like to be trapped between deuce cultures. In this short essay I aim to show that be to two cultures can be very confusing. In Beets by Tiffany Midge we learn a family of four, where the mother is an Indian and the father is white. The eldest daughter learns nearly the Plains Indians and their culture in school, but the truth she is told there is different from the peerless her father wants to prove. Such mixed messages are also what the speaker of Abraham Rodriguez Jrs The boy Without a Flag receives. He refuses to salute the American flag, because his father keeps on lecture about all the bad things America has done to their home Puerto Rico, and indeed believes that he has done what is expected of him, but the father gets angry with him for jeopardizing his commandment and future. The boy feels as if the father has collaborated with the enemy and does not understand how this could have happened. It took him until he had grown up to understand that the father only cherished what was best for him. In Made You Mine, America Ali Zarrin describes his coming to the USA as a adolescent to study and find himself a better future. It was a struggle for him to care 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 homeless people as well.