I am a first generation student directly descended from immigrant family members on both my father's and mother's sides. I have grown up experiencing two very different cultures, mixed in with the notion of standard American culture. My paternal grandmother made sure to impart the importance of Spanish cooking, closeness with family, maintaining relationships with extended family, and the value of education. She raised me for a period of time, along with several other cousins, where she taught us to read and understand Spanish, so we could continue to share that part of our culture with our families. She taught us that food is another way to share our Spanish culture with others, while giving us the opportunity to bond with our loved ones.
My maternal grandmother married an American soldier to leave her life in Germany. As a child, she only had her mother to take care of her, which was not possible at the time. My grandmother had no other family, so she was sent to spend most of her childhood in a local Catholic orphanage. When she got older, she worked as a waitress at a restaurant where she met my grandfather. She married him; when he was re-stationed in the US, she uprooted her life and the life of my mother to follow his career. This brought my mother to the west coast area of the US during her early childhood, where she and my grandmother had to adjust to life in the US. My grandmother always found it important to teach her grandchildren as much as she could about German culture and traditions. Much of my life was spent abiding by traditional German baking and cooking, German Catholic nativity scenes for Christmas, playing with German toys, and listening to German music when we would visit my grandmother.
As a child, I experienced two very different cultures from both sides of my family, in ways that would later shape how I view the world and interact with it. Being half Dominican and half German, I have the appearance of a mixed race person. This has presented its own challenges where people have had racist notions on how they feel they can interact with me and my family. We were often judged by our neighbors for being a mixed race family, which sometimes resulted in neighbors calling us racial slurs and telling us to leave the neighborhood. Family members were sometimes racist and excluded us based on the judgement of my mother being the only German person married into the Spanish family. My mother's side of the family often viewed me and my siblings as being dirty and unworthy due to the fact that we were mixed children. My family, on both sides, had a hard time accepting me and my siblings due to the fact that we were half-German or half-Hispanic, with the appearance of being mixed African-American. These are only a few of the challenges I faced with being a combination of two very different cultures.
My parents both came from poor families and began their family very young. This resulted in neither of my parents having solid careers or the ability to seek a college education. They had little money and sometimes had to work multiple jobs at once. This also meant that they had little time to be with their children, often leaving us in whatever child care they could afford. My parents had to use government resources to provide us with basic healthcare, housing, and food. When I got older, I had to work harder in order to achieve academic recognition and merit so I could apply for a college education. My parents could not afford to send me to school, but supported my decision to go because they wanted a better life from me than they had for themselves.
Everything my family went through to immigrate to the US; the passing on of their cultures and the culmination of their cultures in me and my siblings; and the struggles my family went through to ensure I got the chance to get an education that they could not have all shaped my personality, my mindset, my dreams, and my vision for the future. My dreams for my career have always been geared toward helping others while seeking an education in the medical field. My upbringing always showed me that people with a low socioeconomic status or non-white cultural backgrounds are not provided the same medical care or treatment as those middle class and up are. I wanted to be someone that could change that treatment, while helping those that are less fortunate. I always dreamed of rising from the ranks that I grew up slumming through by obtaining a higher education, and using the hard-earned knowledge that I worked for to help others. Now, my vision for the future is a little different, where I want to work in medical forensics instead, but the vision of being a voice for those who do not have the ability to speak for themselves has remained the same. No matter cultural background, education, economic status, or gender identity, all people deserve to be treated well, and I want to be one of the people that is a part of that change.
