Your Cultural History, Blog #7

My family has been in the United States since the mid to late 1800s. My family immigrated from Ireland and Germany to the United States. My Irish heritage immigrated due to the potato famine that had struck Ireland, there was no food, and my family was one of the hundreds of thousands of families to leave for the booming America of the time. Both sides, my mothers and fathers, immediately began to move west. My mother's family settled in Minnesota until my mother was born when they moved to California. My fathers family settled in Nebraska, where they stayed until my father's generation when they moved to California. So my cultural history is very similar to millions of Americans, and like those others the culture my family would have brought from their homeland has been lost. I definitely think of myself as a fully integrated and assimilated American, nobody in my family speaks any language but English. We have our own traditions, but none based in our cultural heritage or roots. I grew up in a small town of less than 10,000, now has barely 14,000, predominately white christian people, just like me. Everyone around me spoke English fluently, and almost everyone looked exactly like me too. In my town specifically it is hugely dutch, a majority of last names start in "Van" and end in things like "Nuenheizen." It is definitely considered a more bland story of anyone growing up in America. 

I cross referenced my story of how I ended up here with my boyfriend who has a much more fascinating and recent story. His grandmother and grandfather feld Chinese communism and tried to come to America, but at the time America was not allowing Chinese immigrants to come into the country, so they settled in Mexico instead. My boyfriends father and his two brothers, 100% chinese, grew up speaking Spanish in Mexico and only being able to come to America when he was in his early teens. He had to learn English, but was able to get into UC Berkeley and go to Medical School and become a primary care physician. 

His story is so much more "American" to me. His family has faced the struggle and strife of "coming to America," but I also do not see that belittling my families journey either. My family struggled too, worked in factories in New York City for years until they were able to move not speaking English, and getting taken advantage of. Working 18 hours a day and making hardly a dollar a day which was taken away by landlords immediately where they lived and shared a room with 20 other people. But I feel as if the struggle of my people gets lost in the shuffle of the struggle of people who aren't European immigrants such as African Americans, or Chinese, or Mexicans. I think it's important to remember that none of us were born Americans and we all immigrated from somewhere, no matter how many generations ago, none of us has anymore claim to being American than any other American. It is also something that I think gets lost on other white people too who seem to think they have some born right to be better than other immigrants to this country which they don't, and I think they choose to forget that they may have been born here but they didn't come from here. Both sides serve to eliminate any reference to the fact that white people didn't originate here, and it's strange  to me I think because all of this is just information we make up and sell to the world, but none of it's true, we're all the same and we need to stop arguing about who struggled more or who deserves what or who's better than who.