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I wanted to describe how my community and life is how we are looked down upon but shouldn’t let that stop us from following our dreams.

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As we can see I am not your copy paste latina. This is fine because we are all meant to be different and not the same. I am glad that my upbringings were different than those around me. It helped me grow faster and more “alistada” as my parents say. My ultimate goal is for people to take my story of being a first generation oldest from south la. A education I never thought would be possible would be going to elementary middle, high school to now college at a UC institute. I am glad that there have been teachers along the way that have taught me about cultures but as well as real world techniques. Not to mention helping me achieve my plans to where I am at today. I know we all may struggle in school and might seen dumb at times but don’t let that stop us from becoming our true selfs. Learn that life always comes with difficulties but as long as we overcome them and move forward anything is possible. I’m appreciative of all the progress I have achieved with not only being bilingual but as well as learning my parents native language “Nahuatl” each day at a time so I can help and connect to my ancestors all over the world.

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Me the one in red have been the oldest for a while. It has taken me some time to adjust as well as being there for each one of my siblings. As the oldest there is enormous pressure to being the ideal “Mexican daughter”, being first generation and ever to attend school here in America has been quite hard I’m not going to lie. Trying to balance my Spanish from home and school made me bilingual which I appreciate. Therefore as the oldest I have made it my duty to make sure I taught all my siblings the basics before they were sent off to school. To be honest I honestly don’t know how my mom ever made it with us 5 but she always said i was the helper and with that I took it to heart so whenever my mom was always in a complicated situation I would go and help her. Me and my 2 siblings the one in the quince dress and the blue can speak fluent Spanish and english. Due to us proceeding with english my little siblings are what we call “no sabo kids” which is like they can speak it quite well we always try to send them back to their roots, but it has also helped my parents in a way to understand english and try to speak to them.

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Coming from speaking Spanish to english. There have been quiet an amount of struggles. One that I can relate to with Amy tan is her mother telling her to speak to an older person so they can treat her more seriously because if her mother were to talk they would not take her seriously because of her accent. In my similar experience when it came to going places I had went with my mother because she didn’t know how to get to places as well when speaking since she didn’t know english I would have to speak or when it came to important phone calls I would answer for her just to be treated as them and not look down upon her. Ultimately speaking that these situations helped me grow up and understand the world better and quicker but as well as making sure I know where I stand and will have to work twice as hard in order to achieve the things I want.

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I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.

I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language -- the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all -- all the Englishes I grew up with. Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, "The intersection of memory upon imagination" and "There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus'--a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.
So you'll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like, I'11 quote what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotaped and then transcribed. During this conversation, my mother was talking about a political gangster in Shanghai who had the same last name as her family's, Du, and how the gangster in his early years wanted to be adopted by her family, which was rich by comparison. Later, the gangster became more powerful, far richer than my mother's family, and one day showed up at my mother's wedding to pay his respects. Here's what she said in part: "Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He is Du like Du Zong -- but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people. That man want to ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family. Du Zong father wasn't look down on him, but didn't take seriously, until that man big like become a mafia. Now important person, very hard to inviting him. Chinese way, came only to show respect, don't stay for dinner. Respect for making big celebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom. Chinese social life that way. If too important won't have to stay too long. He come to my wedding. I didn't see, I heard it. I gone to boy's side, they haveYMCA dinner. Chinese age I was nineteen ."
You should know that my mother's expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine's books with ease--all kinds of things I can't begin to understand. Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.
Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as 'broken" or "fractured" English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than "broken," as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard other terms used, "limited English," for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people's perceptions of the limited English speaker.

I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother's "limited" English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to sayThat is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.

My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was fifteen, she used to have me call people on the phone to pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, "This is Mrs. Tan." And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, "Why he don't send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money. And then I said in perfect English, "Yes, I'm getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn't arrived."
And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, "Why he don't send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money.

And then I said in perfect English, "Yes, I'm getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn't arrived."

Then she began to talk more loudly. "What he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?" And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, "I can't tolerate any more excuses. If I don't receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak to your manager when I'm in New York next week."And sure enough, the following week there we were in front of this astonished stockbroker, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English. We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find out about a benign brain tumor a CAT scan had revealed a month ago. She said she had spoken very good English, her best English, no mistakes. Still, she said, the hospital did not apologize when they said they had lost the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they would not give her any more information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn't budge. And when the doctor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English -- lo and behold -- we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference call on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake.
I think my mother's English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person's developing language skills are more influenced by peers. But I do think that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which are more insular, plays a large role in shaping the language of the child. And I believe that it affected my results on achievement tests, I.Q. tests, and the SAT. While my English skills were never judged as poor, compared to math, English could not be considered my strong suit. In grade school I did moderately well, getting perhaps B's, sometimes B-pluses, in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile onachievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved A's and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher.
This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as, "Even though Tom was, Mary thought he was --."And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, "Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was charming:' with the grammatical structure "even though" limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites, so you wouldn't get answers like, "Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous:' Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like that The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in which you were supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship -- for example, "Sunset is to nightfall as is to ." And here you would be presented with a list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of relationship: red is to stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever, yawn is to boring: Well, I could never think that way. I knew what the tests were asking, but I could not block out of my mind the images already created by the first pair, "sunset is to nightfall"--and I would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering of a curtain of stars.And all the other pairs of words --red, bus, stoplight, boring--just threw up a mass of confusing images, making it impossible for me to sort out something as logical as saying: "A sunset precedes nightfall" is the same as "a chill precedes a fever." The only way I would have gotten that answer right would have been to imagine an associative situation, for example, my being disobedient and staying out past sunset, catching a chill at night, which turns into feverish pneumonia as punishment, which indeed did happen to me.
I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother's English, about achievement tests. Because lately I've been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian Americans represented in American literature. Why are there few AsianAmericans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering! Well, these are broad sociological questions I can't begin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys -- in fact, just last week -- that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as "broken" or "limited."And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me.

Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management.

But it wasn't until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at first I wrote using what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language. Here's an example from the first draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club, but without this line: "That was my mental quandary in its nascent state."A terrible line, which I can barely pronounce.

Fortunately, for reasons I won't get into today, I later decided I should envision a reader for the stories I would write.And the reader I decided upon was my mother, because these were stories about mothers. So with this reader in mind -- and in fact she did read my early drafts--I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as "simple"; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as "broken"; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as "watered down"; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted tocapture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.

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I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others. I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life.

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My parents have been my biggest supporters. One things they always say is “hecha les ganas mija para que no seas como nosotros”, this always stuck with me because I know from the bottom of both of their hearts they only want what’s best for me. They hope for me and my siblings to fulfill the American college dream, which there were times I wanted to give up on my education but couldn’t because I always thought that I know I can do more, for not only myself but as well as my siblings and most for them both,I want them to know all their hard work has payed off and make me an example for all their family members.

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Here’s an example of me and my friends. We all are different and looked into society in a variety of ways. We each have our own problems and solutions to them. What makes us united and proud of ourselves is that we have found our identities and are able to show it off to others such as we all like going to bailes or jaripeos and very much like to show each others cultures and appreciate them. For example I am full Mexican from my parents. Christine (in red) is half Guatemalan and Mexican. Emily (floral) is Salvadoran and Guatemala. We all appreciate to talk about our own cultures and how we grew up to shape the people who we are today.

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This is what we call a jaripeos and baile. This is what helped me get a better sense of myself. I always overthink so, naturally I wondered what would people think if people know that I listen to Spanish music or dance. It came up in my late I realized I can start sharing my likes and dislikes because not only am i leaving to another city but i can start over if I wanted to. So what I decided was that I would rather not let my thoughts win but embrace who I am. So I started to get into my culture little by little as well, as being into dances dressing more Hispanic and being able to cook certain dishes I like. I notice that people won’t even care as long as your happy. I’m surprised it took me a while but I wanted to share it out to those who are still scared to embrace their own cultures that they can do it we will all work together in the future to support one another.

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Growing up in South Central la, and other communities like Compton and watts. It might be seen as dangerous to those outside of the city due to it’s reputation but in fact it’s not all like that it has been home to me. It feels like I got a sense of identity of where I am and my identity because I grew up with mostly Hispanics around me. I also want to emphasis that this made me grow up quicker because I didn’t realize people saw this as a dangerous area but I saw it rather as my home my people, my community where we help each other. So when it came to school it was quite different but I have learned to manage both and help me become who I am today.

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I wanted to mention that in this song it’s a really emphasis on Hispanics and Latinos. That we are always looked down upon that’s why we might think we aren’t good enough or we aren’t their ideal workers. Which has been proven wrong each and more times now because we are able to voice out our opinions and more people like us are coming into the work force. It’s not just our average American but now as well as latinas working big jobs like lawyers, relators or cooperate jobs. This video really emphasizes that although we do look different we can still get the job done and I think this is a big emphasis so people don’t give up, but rather see this as an inspiration to break down stereotypes and strive for more and bigger along the way.

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The Hamilton Mixtape: Immigrants (We Get The Job Done)