The Way an American Identity is Created

How is American Identity created? Do we have to create the identity or does it just happen by itself? I think that you make it yourself, it should be earned. My great grandpa was from Mexico, but when he was old enough he immigrated to America. He told me his story of how he created his own American Identity. He agreed with me that sharing the American dream is one step closer to becoming a truly American.

My great grandpa was born and raised in Mexico. He moved to America once he was old enough to travel by himself. He came as a lowly Mexican immigrant, but he worked hard. When he first moved he lived in an apartment where bad things would happen literally every single day. He stayed out of it and got a decent job and worked very hard for many years. He met my great grandma and they had children. For the first five years they were together people stayed away from them because the white people didn’t like them. After years people started to be ok with them, my great grandpa got enough money to buy a nice house in a nicer neighborhood. My great grandpa has worked very hard to be where he is now.

The immigrant contribution is very similar to a lot of the things my great grandpa did. My great grandpa teached a lot of things to all the people who didn’t know a lot of things about his hometown. He also shared his food from his hometown to all the people he knew. ” In greatly enriching the American vocabulary, it has been a major force in establishing “the American language,” which, as H. L. Mencken demonstrated thirty years ago, had diverged materially from the mother tongue as spoken in Britain. ” This quote relates to my great grandpa’s story because he enriched a lot of different peoples lives with Mexican religion, stories, and foods. He is still enriching people’s lives with Mexican culture to this day.

An American Identity is created by working hard and sharing the American dream. My great grandpa did and had exactly that when he came to America. He worked hard his whole life making a name for himself in his neighborhoods. He never got in any trouble with the police which made him a perfect American citizen. Now no one can take that away from him.

Works Cited

1. Jones, J. M., & Ramírez, R. R. (2019). Changing Patterns of Immigrant Identity in the United States. In The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics (pp. 165-188). Wiley.
2. Portes, A., & Rumbaut, R. G. (2014). Immigrant America: A Portrait. University of California Press.
3. Jacobson, M. F. (1999). Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Harvard University Press.
4. Ignatiev, N. (1995). How the Irish Became White. Routledge.
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9. Waldinger, R. (2015). How the Other Half Works: Immigration and the Social Organization of Labor. University of California Press.
10. Higham, J. (2009). Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. Rutgers University Press.