A Taste of American Pie :: Ethnicity Mexican American Essays

A Taste of the Statesn Pie Sunday morning. The smell of dredge tortillas warming on the kitchen stove would waft all the way to my room. I could hear the radio play scratchy ranchera tunes to which my mother always seemed to manage the words. If I lay long enough in bed, my mother would laissez passer in the room and try to wake me up, re differentiateing to singing my name or an old Spanish nursery rhyme if all else failed. Ask me where fundament is, and Ill tell you incisively this. This is home. This is me. All Ive ever bedn is Mexican culture. some(prenominal) of my p atomic number 18nts were born in Mexico, and I myself have never lived more than a few hours from the border. Ive never kn accept a Christmas without tamales or a kinfolk 16 th without celebration. But I am not just Mexican. I am Mexican-American. Mxico may be home, but America is where I live. I find here in college that I am just beginning to learn what it means to be American. I utilize to think that I would find that meaning through a sort of duality anything that wasnt Mexican or part of the minority would have to be American. Ironically, the idea of Americanness was closer to home. Ive come to realize that to be American is to know and share myself. America is a conglomerate of many a(prenominal) cultures. As such, it possesses no single, distinct culture. There is no one overarching American culture that is free-lance of all those that make it up. The supposed melting pot of peoples is not but an accurate portrayal of America. This nation is dotted with cultural enclaves that nurture their own customs and traditions rather than fuse them with others. I, for one, would not give up my Mexican identity to become simply American. I am sure that many would agree that we are all more than American. Each culture, therefore, remains basically unique, never really melting into another. To call yourself American is to recognize that yo u are a small, albeit integral, part of a greater phenomenon.