From the words of my family, there are a lot of smart people in the world, and then there’s us, the people who fight to be recognized as smart. That’s a motto my family has lived by; to keep fighting till everyone recognizes that we belong. From this course I learned that this applies to a lot of immigrant families such as mine. We have come to America to not just be American, but for a better future. For everyone to look at us as equals and to say you belong in the land of the free, because everyone belongs in the land of the free. For different immigrants this simply wasn’t the case. The Irish and Chinese of the early 1900’s knew what it meant to not feel welcomed or wanted, and knew what it took to fight for that here in the United States. But over time, generation after generation, people saw the need to be more accepting, more open, and more aware of the changing times. Yet even today, Mexican-Americans are looked upon as the Irish were over 100 years ago.
In this class I’ve learned it’s too early for us as a society to say that there is an American template. Every day that template changes according to who came through JFK airport yesterday. From interviewing my family to studying and understand the changing ways of an entire immigrant group, I can see that New York is a very special place. We are always open to some one new, even though the rest of the country may not be. But of course as New Yorkers, we always have high expectations of every one around us.
