American Chica

American Chica Essay When talking about finding a sense of one’s self and identity things can get extremely difficult and confusing. It is hard for people to distinguish between identity and a sense of self. When Maria Arana describes herself as an “American Chica,” you can already see confusion in just these words. In this description there are two different languages, English and Spanish, which to me makes it seem like she is talking about both her identity and since of self because she is confused between the two. Since she used this method in her title, I think she is confused between her sense of self and identity which makes it seem like she is referring to both. I don’t believe she has a strong enough sense of self or knows enough about identity to be able to just refer to one and not the other. Maria Arana came from both a Peruvian and American background which explains why she used both Spanish and English in the title. Just from reading the title I can already see immediate confusion between her sense of self and identity. If she wanted to distinguish between self and identity, I don’t think she should have used two languages. For example, Huntington’s sources of identity use different categories to identify people. Ascriptive, cultural, territorial, political, economical, and social are the different categories. The title, using both Spanish and English, shows a connection with both the cultural and territorial categories because it involves two different languages and two different countries (Huntington, 27). At the same time however the title also holds a sense of self because it involves a social and biological aspect of her life. “There are two schools of thought that come to mind regarding how the self comes into existence. The first type assumes a social process or social order as the logical and biological precondition of the appearance of the selves of the individual organism involved in that process or belonging to that order. The other