My Mexican Family

I come from a Mexican family. I have four sibling, two older sisters, one younger sister and one brother. My mother and father were both born and raised in the city across the Calexico border, Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico. They were both raised by deeply engrained Mexican families and followed many of their culture’s traditions. Both of my parents come from very humble families and sadly, one of these cultural aspects of having been born into poor Mexican families was that as soon as one was able to work, they would stop attending school and help with the family’s economic situation. My mother was able to graduate from middle school, while my father couldn’t finish elementary school. My parents never married and didn’t have a good
My first language is Spanish and it was also my home speaking language while growing up. When I began going to school my mother decided that it was best for me and my siblings to have bilingual classes. Consequently, I never really got to practice my English during my first four years of school because I was in bilingual classes and everyone’s first language was Spanish. At home it wasn’t any different; we would only speak Spanish and watched the Mexican channels because we did not had cable. By fourth grade I began to notice that most of my classmates had assimilated with the American culture. They would mostly speak English quite fluently and talked about MTV and other popular shows at the time. During that year, I noticed that I wasn’t fitting in with the rest of my classmates. I mostly talked in Spanish and I had no idea what MTV was. By the end of the first quarter I began staying after school for the reading program because I was below grade level in my reading skills. Since my mother never learned English, it was hard for her to help us with our homework. As a result, my sibling and I were responsible for completing our own homework. The rest of my grade school years weren’t as harsh to deal with because there were other children who were in the same boat as
I was never confident with my English speaking skills because I hardly practice speaking my second language. Children in the middle school ages often find ways to humiliate other children and my classmates were no different. They would always laugh and made cruel jokes of other classmates for anything and if you did not sounded like the rest of the kids you would be targeted for having the “Mexican accent.” And I didn’t wanted to be pointed out as such; therefore, I did anything I could to not speak it in front of others. But there was also part of me who wanted to fit in with the popular kids. One day during social studies, two of my “popular classmates” were taking about a movie that had recently come out. And I since I had watched it, I wanted to make a good impression. I asked the girl, “Did you wash the movie?” Both of them began laughing hysterically and for the rest of the day they made fun of me and told everyone how I said wash it instead of watched it. I had wanted so much to fit in with the rest of my popular, fluent English speaking classmates and instead I added on to my discomfort of speaking the American