another liberal "professor" shows his true colors
Apr 11, 2017 14:20:46 #
Progressive One wrote:
you sound like one although we are cool.....why would Obama save the economy and orchestrate record job growth, provide health care and even get your Bin Laden is there was so much malice on his part? Plus it sounds like you're given a worse president a pass while holding a better one to task....just because of what?
"why would Obama save the economy and orchestrate record job growth, provide health care and even get your Bin Laden...?" - PO
Really?????
Why would you make such blatantly wrong assertions?
OB's "malice" was for a Constitutional Republic. He demonstrated that with his EO's.
Apr 11, 2017 14:21:32 #
Tackling what it means to be ‘fully American’
Assimilation is a complex balancing act for immigrants
KAREN, an immigrant known as a “Dreamer” who attends Cal State Fullerton, says she’s caught between her Mexican roots and her U.S. upbringing. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong anywhere,” she says. (Genaro Molina Los Angeles Times)
By Hailey Branson-Potts
Growing up in La Puente in the 1980s, Alex Espinoza was a typical child of the Reagan era. He collected “Star Wars” action figures and played with Rubik’s Cube.
But Espinoza was Mexican, born in Tijuana and brought to the United States by his mother when he was about 2 years old. He downplayed his Mexican roots to fit in. At the time, it seemed the worst thing in the world for a boy to be labeled as “a TJ” — literally someone from Tijuana, but also shorthand for an unassimilated Mexican.
“I grew up preferring the taste of a Big Mac over a burrito. I grew up preferring the taste of tuna noodle casserole over menudo,” he said. “Until I went to Mexico as a grad student, Mexico was this kind of static in the background.”
Three decades later, President Trump has sparked a new debate over immigration and assimilation that has Espinoza and many others reflecting on what it means to blend into American culture.
While much has been made about Trump’s harsh talk of deporting those here illegally, the president’s comments about the need for immigrants to fully embrace American culture has renewed a long-running debate that dates back generations.
“Not everyone who seeks to join our country will be able to successfully assimilate,” Trump said in a campaign-trail speech in which he called for new immigrants to pass an “ideological certification to make sure that those we are admitting to our country share our values and love our people.”
In one Republican debate, Trump declared that “we have a country where, to assimilate, you have to speak English.... This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.”
Though Espinoza and others might disagree with Trump’s policies on immigration, they say discussions about assimilation get to the heart of a balancing act all immigrants face: being American while preserving a strong sense of where they came from.
“Have I been assimilated? I don’t know,” said the 45-year-old director of the graduate creative writing and literary arts program at Cal State Los Angeles. “Some people will probably say yes — look at how I dress and speak and where I’m educated. And some people will say no — he speaks Spanish and has a Mexican passport.”
When he went to Mexico for the first time as an adult, the way he spoke, tripping over some Spanish words, instantly pegged him as American. Espinoza is a permanent legal resident but believes that even if he became a U.S. citizen he would never be considered “fully American” by some people.
“Even if I started right now speaking in a Southern drawl and listening to country music, I’m still going to be Mexican,” he said. “My skin is still going to be a certain shade. Assimilation is not this thing where it’s like, ‘OK, I’m one of you.’ ”
Though people often define assimilation in starkly different ways, a Pew Research Center survey released in February showed that 92% of Americans say it’s at least somewhat important for a person to speak English to be considered “truly American,” with 70% saying it’s “very” important.
More than 80% of the survey’s respondents believed that sharing American culture and traditions is at least somewhat important to national identity.
“We at least have absorbed and believe this national narrative that we are a nation of immigrants,” said Bruce Stokes, director of global economic attitudes at Pew. “But ... it’s not so easy once you get into some of the details of diversity. People are saying, ‘This is good for the country, but it’s not good for me,’ and that ‘Diversity is good, but actually I don’t like the fact that someone speaks Spanish in the store I go to.’ ”
These questions have dominated immigrant communities since the 19th century, when the Italians, Irish, Germans, Chinese and other groups faced questions about whether they were true Americans.
The foreign-born share of the U.S. population has quadrupled in the five decades since the establishment of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended a quota system based on national origin that favored white European immigrants. In 1960, 9.7 million foreign-born residents were living in the U.S. In 2014, there were 42.2 million, according to census data and the Pew Research Center.
Kevin Solis, who works for the immigration advocacy group Dream Team LA, said politicians’ statements about assimilation just add fuel to an already sensitive subject.
“When you say, ‘They need to assimilate,’ you’re already beginning with the false notion that they don’t want to, that they’re coming here as an invading force,” he said. “It’s coded in the sense that these are ‘other’ people, foreigners who want to do harm to our nation, and that’s not the case.”
Jim Chang, an information systems specialist from Irvine, recalled meeting with one of his son’s teachers; she kept repeating what he was saying.
“I know she was repeating, you know, saying it more than once because she was worried I didn’t understand,” Chang, 53, said.
Though he spoke English fairly well and understood it even better, Chang said his Korean accent meant he would always stick out.
“It doesn’t matter if you have 12 years or 20 years in the U.S. If they hear us sound a little different, they judge,” he said.
That’s something he said he believes his son, a fifth-grader, shouldn’t have to face. Chang speaks Korean to him, but his son, Jimmy, responds in English.
“I realize that we don’t plan to return to live in Korea. We belong in California now,” Chang said.
But Carmen Fought, a linguistics professor at Pitzer College, said that everyone has an accent regardless of how well they speak English. Whether it’s the Cajun or “Minnesota nice” or “Bronx” or other accent not quite on the radar of American pop culture, everyone in the U.S. speaks with an accent, she said.
Not all accents, however, are perceived as equally American.
“A way of speaking that’s associated with a group that’s stigmatized is also going to be stigmatized,” Fought said. “There’s also going to be racism and prejudice against that way of speaking.”
Karen, a 24-year-old honor student at Cal State Fullerton, is an aspiring certified public accountant. She volunteers for the Internal Revenue Service — where her ability to speak Spanish is a major asset — helping low-income people fill out their taxes.
The night Trump was elected, Karen — a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, recipient who asked that her last name not be used because she fears deportation — suddenly felt as if she stood out even though she was an infant sleeping in the back seat of a car when she was brought to the U.S. illegally from Mexico.
Karen hasn’t been back to Mexico since then but grew up in the overwhelmingly Latino community of Huntington Park, watching Spanish-language television with her grandmother and working in a Mexican restaurant.
Moving to Orange County for college was like moving to a different world, Karen said. At least until Trump’s election, she felt that she was safer as a college student than her parents, who have labor-oriented jobs.
Her younger brother is a DACA recipient also, and she had him move in with her so they could remove their parents’ address from their federal forms.
“Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong anywhere,” she said. “In Mexico, I would be seen very differently because of my accent. It’s like, ‘God, what do I do?’ If I were to go back, I wouldn’t have anything back there.
“On the one side, the Hispanics tell you, ‘You’re way too American.’ On the other, you’ll have the Americans telling you you’re too Hispanic. It’s hard to be in the middle.
“What makes me American? It’s not only the 24 years of my life. It’s that this is all I know.”
hailey.branson@latimes.com
Times staff writer Anh Do contributed to this report.
Assimilation is a complex balancing act for immigrants
KAREN, an immigrant known as a “Dreamer” who attends Cal State Fullerton, says she’s caught between her Mexican roots and her U.S. upbringing. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong anywhere,” she says. (Genaro Molina Los Angeles Times)
By Hailey Branson-Potts
Growing up in La Puente in the 1980s, Alex Espinoza was a typical child of the Reagan era. He collected “Star Wars” action figures and played with Rubik’s Cube.
But Espinoza was Mexican, born in Tijuana and brought to the United States by his mother when he was about 2 years old. He downplayed his Mexican roots to fit in. At the time, it seemed the worst thing in the world for a boy to be labeled as “a TJ” — literally someone from Tijuana, but also shorthand for an unassimilated Mexican.
“I grew up preferring the taste of a Big Mac over a burrito. I grew up preferring the taste of tuna noodle casserole over menudo,” he said. “Until I went to Mexico as a grad student, Mexico was this kind of static in the background.”
Three decades later, President Trump has sparked a new debate over immigration and assimilation that has Espinoza and many others reflecting on what it means to blend into American culture.
While much has been made about Trump’s harsh talk of deporting those here illegally, the president’s comments about the need for immigrants to fully embrace American culture has renewed a long-running debate that dates back generations.
“Not everyone who seeks to join our country will be able to successfully assimilate,” Trump said in a campaign-trail speech in which he called for new immigrants to pass an “ideological certification to make sure that those we are admitting to our country share our values and love our people.”
In one Republican debate, Trump declared that “we have a country where, to assimilate, you have to speak English.... This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.”
Though Espinoza and others might disagree with Trump’s policies on immigration, they say discussions about assimilation get to the heart of a balancing act all immigrants face: being American while preserving a strong sense of where they came from.
“Have I been assimilated? I don’t know,” said the 45-year-old director of the graduate creative writing and literary arts program at Cal State Los Angeles. “Some people will probably say yes — look at how I dress and speak and where I’m educated. And some people will say no — he speaks Spanish and has a Mexican passport.”
When he went to Mexico for the first time as an adult, the way he spoke, tripping over some Spanish words, instantly pegged him as American. Espinoza is a permanent legal resident but believes that even if he became a U.S. citizen he would never be considered “fully American” by some people.
“Even if I started right now speaking in a Southern drawl and listening to country music, I’m still going to be Mexican,” he said. “My skin is still going to be a certain shade. Assimilation is not this thing where it’s like, ‘OK, I’m one of you.’ ”
Though people often define assimilation in starkly different ways, a Pew Research Center survey released in February showed that 92% of Americans say it’s at least somewhat important for a person to speak English to be considered “truly American,” with 70% saying it’s “very” important.
More than 80% of the survey’s respondents believed that sharing American culture and traditions is at least somewhat important to national identity.
“We at least have absorbed and believe this national narrative that we are a nation of immigrants,” said Bruce Stokes, director of global economic attitudes at Pew. “But ... it’s not so easy once you get into some of the details of diversity. People are saying, ‘This is good for the country, but it’s not good for me,’ and that ‘Diversity is good, but actually I don’t like the fact that someone speaks Spanish in the store I go to.’ ”
These questions have dominated immigrant communities since the 19th century, when the Italians, Irish, Germans, Chinese and other groups faced questions about whether they were true Americans.
The foreign-born share of the U.S. population has quadrupled in the five decades since the establishment of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended a quota system based on national origin that favored white European immigrants. In 1960, 9.7 million foreign-born residents were living in the U.S. In 2014, there were 42.2 million, according to census data and the Pew Research Center.
Kevin Solis, who works for the immigration advocacy group Dream Team LA, said politicians’ statements about assimilation just add fuel to an already sensitive subject.
“When you say, ‘They need to assimilate,’ you’re already beginning with the false notion that they don’t want to, that they’re coming here as an invading force,” he said. “It’s coded in the sense that these are ‘other’ people, foreigners who want to do harm to our nation, and that’s not the case.”
Jim Chang, an information systems specialist from Irvine, recalled meeting with one of his son’s teachers; she kept repeating what he was saying.
“I know she was repeating, you know, saying it more than once because she was worried I didn’t understand,” Chang, 53, said.
Though he spoke English fairly well and understood it even better, Chang said his Korean accent meant he would always stick out.
“It doesn’t matter if you have 12 years or 20 years in the U.S. If they hear us sound a little different, they judge,” he said.
That’s something he said he believes his son, a fifth-grader, shouldn’t have to face. Chang speaks Korean to him, but his son, Jimmy, responds in English.
“I realize that we don’t plan to return to live in Korea. We belong in California now,” Chang said.
But Carmen Fought, a linguistics professor at Pitzer College, said that everyone has an accent regardless of how well they speak English. Whether it’s the Cajun or “Minnesota nice” or “Bronx” or other accent not quite on the radar of American pop culture, everyone in the U.S. speaks with an accent, she said.
Not all accents, however, are perceived as equally American.
“A way of speaking that’s associated with a group that’s stigmatized is also going to be stigmatized,” Fought said. “There’s also going to be racism and prejudice against that way of speaking.”
Karen, a 24-year-old honor student at Cal State Fullerton, is an aspiring certified public accountant. She volunteers for the Internal Revenue Service — where her ability to speak Spanish is a major asset — helping low-income people fill out their taxes.
The night Trump was elected, Karen — a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, recipient who asked that her last name not be used because she fears deportation — suddenly felt as if she stood out even though she was an infant sleeping in the back seat of a car when she was brought to the U.S. illegally from Mexico.
Karen hasn’t been back to Mexico since then but grew up in the overwhelmingly Latino community of Huntington Park, watching Spanish-language television with her grandmother and working in a Mexican restaurant.
Moving to Orange County for college was like moving to a different world, Karen said. At least until Trump’s election, she felt that she was safer as a college student than her parents, who have labor-oriented jobs.
Her younger brother is a DACA recipient also, and she had him move in with her so they could remove their parents’ address from their federal forms.
“Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong anywhere,” she said. “In Mexico, I would be seen very differently because of my accent. It’s like, ‘God, what do I do?’ If I were to go back, I wouldn’t have anything back there.
“On the one side, the Hispanics tell you, ‘You’re way too American.’ On the other, you’ll have the Americans telling you you’re too Hispanic. It’s hard to be in the middle.
“What makes me American? It’s not only the 24 years of my life. It’s that this is all I know.”
hailey.branson@latimes.com
Times staff writer Anh Do contributed to this report.
Apr 11, 2017 14:24:57 #
eagleye13 wrote:
"why would Obama save the economy and orchestrate record job growth, provide health care and even get your Bin Laden...?" - PO
Really?????
Why would you make such blatantly wrong assertions?
OB's "malice" was for a Constitutional Republic. He demonstrated that with his EO's.
Really?????
Why would you make such blatantly wrong assertions?
OB's "malice" was for a Constitutional Republic. He demonstrated that with his EO's.
How? Look at the right with this Supreme Court manipulation....anything goes moving forward so forget the Constitution....you people treat it like toilet paper when it doesn't work for you and then hide behind fake loyalty to it when it does..........fk that fake ass patriotism bullshit..............
Check out topic: Red Ties show up, speak up for Trump in NYC
Apr 11, 2017 14:37:56 #
Progressive One wrote:
you sound like one although we are cool.....why would Obama save the economy and orchestrate record job growth, provide health care and even get your Bin Laden if there was so much malice on his part? Plus it sounds like you're given a worse president a pass while holding a better one to task....just because of what?
Progressives One, well thought out and well stated. I agree 100%.
Apr 11, 2017 14:55:33 #
Glaucon wrote:
Progressives One, well thought out and well stated. I agree 100%.
thanks Glaucon.....conventional logic makes that apparent......
Apr 11, 2017 15:04:00 #
Progressive One wrote:
not ten feel tall or bullet proof...but i'm not scary and can bring offense that would surprise...not my thing though...I'm a scholar...more prestige than being a billy badd ass ....my end game as a winner if to take out more than one since I can only go once myself.....always wanted to be my own hero..................a winner from beginning to end....I don't bother anyone...just try to keep heat off of my ass......
Let me explain what a hero is since you have no clue. He/she is one who steps forward in the face of danger or life, not hesitating and fearing his/her own life to save others and thinking none of it! You are to high on your self to ever become one!!!!
Apr 11, 2017 15:11:27 #
200MPHTape wrote:
Let me explain what a hero is since you have no clue. He/she is one who steps forward in the face of danger or life, not hesitating and fearing his/her own life to save others and thinking none of it! You are to high on your self to ever become one!!!!
"Too" high...there are heroes outside of your emotional, dramatic view of life......learn to relax and not be so fking spastic...........so far in life, I've been any fking thing I've aspired to be so shut your dumb ass up trying to tell someone what the fk their limitations are............
Check out topic: Joe Biden REJECTION Bombshell
Apr 11, 2017 15:14:47 #
Michael Rich
Loc: Lapine Oregon
200MPHTape wrote:
Let me explain what a hero is since you have no clue. He/she is one who steps forward in the face of danger or life, not hesitating and fearing his/her own life to save others and thinking none of it! You are to high on your self to ever become one!!!!
You see how mad he got?...he's actually proving your point.
Apr 11, 2017 15:15:53 #
Apr 11, 2017 15:18:04 #
Michael Rich
Loc: Lapine Oregon
Progressive One wrote:
"Too" high...there are heroes outside of your emotional, dramatic view of life......learn to relax and not be so fking spastic...........so far in life, I've been any fking thing I've aspired to be so shut your dumb ass up trying to tell someone what the fk their limitations are............
you have not aspired to be honest with yourself.
Apr 11, 2017 15:21:40 #
byronglimish wrote:
You see how mad he got?...he's actually proving your point.
Hilarious....quit trying to dump your own degree of personal negativity on others.....quit wishing for the misery of others.....look who you grew up to be in a fking chat room wishing someone else was unhappy....no wonder you people are so depressed....it is your negative nature........
Check out topic: United nations, Aiding, & Abetting?
Apr 11, 2017 15:22:50 #
byronglimish wrote:
you have not aspired to be honest with yourself.
That is okay......do what works for you....what I do works in grand fashion for me.............
Apr 11, 2017 15:34:04 #
Michael Rich
Loc: Lapine Oregon
Progressive One wrote:
That is okay......do what works for you....what I do works in grand fashion for me.............
your sinister fashion of self glory is a limitless supply of self delusion.
so far I have not read any other people on OPP boasting of personal greatness..like you do...but I have read way more intelligent post than yours.
Apr 11, 2017 15:40:37 #
byronglimish wrote:
your sinister fashion of self glory is a limitless supply of self delusion.
so far I have not read any other people on OPP boasting of personal greatness..like you do...but I have read way more intelligent post than yours.
so far I have not read any other people on OPP boasting of personal greatness..like you do...but I have read way more intelligent post than yours.
pretend I'm white and a racist conservative....then you can say it is just self-esteem....haha...........you never mention what is said to me for me to respond as such so fk you and your dishonesty......I posted once about how to design interfaces, interrupt driven systems and programming microprocessor chips with assembler language.....I thought that was intelligent......employers did also....but the OPP types swear I made it all up to impress their backwoods asses....imagine that...........
Apr 11, 2017 16:11:18 #
Michael Rich
Loc: Lapine Oregon
Progressive One wrote:
pretend I'm white and a racist conservative....then you can say it is just self-esteem....haha...........you never mention what is said to me for me to respond as such so fk you and your dishonesty......I posted once about how to design interfaces, interrupt driven systems and programming microprocessor chips with assembler language.....I thought that was intelligent......employers did also....but the OPP types swear I made it all up to impress their backwoods asses....imagine that...........
I do not have to imagine anything..you have convinced yourself and your self "only" as to your alleged magnitude of achievement.
I have and will continue to read other people on OPP that have more intelligence and humility then you will ever be capable of comprehending .
Do you also kiss and wink at yourself in the mirror?
If I were to imagine anything about your type ...it would be the admiration of your own reflection.
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Check out topic: The Biden Trump Debate is Insulting.