I’m Not an Imitation of Someone Else, I’m Latina :: Personal Narrative Writing

I’m Not an Imitation of Someone Else, I’m Latina As I sat at the kitchen table on those chilly winter evenings in Kenner, Louisiana, I could feel my mother staring at me from where she was. I was busy doing my homework, and she was preparing that night's supper. She would always start off by asking me what I was doing and the only thing I would ever answer was, "Oh, nothing. Just homework." Then I would turn away and sort of look in the other direction as if to tell her to leave me alone, because I had a lot to do. At the time I was only eight years old, in my second complete year of schooling in the United States. I had already fully grasped the English language, and it had been a year and a half since I had been removed from the bilingual program. In actuality, I had become Americanized quiet easily. Although this was a process that involvedgive and take, because although I did adapt to my new environment very well, I never let go of what I had already learned in my previous environment. I can recall that at the same time that I was learning to read and write in English, I was also learning to do so in my native tongue, Spanish. In school, as I sat in the small wooden house, which was the bilingual classroom, I could clearly remember wondering why it was that "Spot" was so important. For more than a month we had been learning about this brown dog and about seeing him run. This experience was very strange for me, not only because it was in a totally new language but because I never did really see spot run. I only saw him painted on an oversized illustrated notebook. After a long and confusing day at school, I would come home to do my assignments; alone. It wasn't that my mother did not want to help me, but she couldn't. She knew little about the assignment , and knew even less about the language. At first I didn't mind. The assignments were easy for me to figure out, and if it was really hard I would just tell the teacher the next day that I couldn't figure it out. Sh e would ask me why I didn't ask my mother for help, and I would have to respond to her, "because she didn't know either.