From Mexican To American

It’s 1920 and you, Alonzo Vasquez, are a Mexican immigrant to the United States. While you love your new country, it is very important to you that your family remember and honor your culture and traditions, many of which are tied to your homeland. You are increasingly worried that your children, in the process of becoming “American,” are ignoring the importance of their heritage. Why is it so important to you that your family retain some cultural connection to Mexico and your Mexican heritage? What evidence is there that your children are being wholly “Americanized?” What conflicts has this created between you and your children?

*This assignment, while allowing for creativity, MUST draw from your VoF readings for the week and Becoming Mexican American.


It is now 1920 and I, Alonzo Vasquez, am a newly immigrated Mexican to America. We came in hope of opportunity and to live a better life then we had in Mexico, unfortunately I fear that if we stay here longer we will destroy our family. I am quite upset with the customs of America and their inability to allow us to keep our own traditions and culture. I have a problem with the way they are changing my family and forcing their ideology onto our community. We should not have to live our lives to their specific customs.

My four children, two daughters and two sons, are quickly evolving into Americans while my wife and I are attempting to force them to remember their roots. Here in America the children go off and work at young ages and are forced to grow up quick. They do not have a chance to be children; they start providing and at a young age are somehow expected to be literate in the American ways. I do not understand how the Americans think they can take away our children and break our families apart. It is as if we are losing our children. They take them away to teach them American customs and brainwash them that we have taught them wrong and not done our best to provide for them. That we, their parents, are wrong.

As if it wasn’t worse, many of the children in this community we live in have left their families at young ages to be married off to white American men or women. These children have forgotten their heritage and are quickly becoming Americanized. Many of our neighbors in this Mexican community tell stories of their children that have grown and moved far away from home. They leave their family and create new lives floating around the United States while we, their parents, stay at home worrying if they are ok and pondering if we will ever be able to see them again. I fear that one day this turmoil will ruin the Mexican families and we will not even exist, we will become extinct. We are a dying bread.

I fail to understand why my family is so attracted to this country. I beg them to return home, yet they claim to have opportunity and feel safer here in America, while in the past years I have done nothing but my best to protect them in Mexico. I feel betrayed. Is it that my children do no longer trust me? As if that was not bad enough, they decide they would rather be out in the town and meeting new people rather than spending the little precious time we have together as a family. It upsets me that I work all day for meager wages to barely put food on the table and my family does not only take everything for granted but wants to forget their past. I want my family to be my family, I will not stand to watch American and it’s customs take my children away from me. To take my children away from the Mexican way of life. It shall not corrupt them anymore.