Self and Other: Language and Identity

            The readings for this week discussed language and identity. In my bilingual education classes, we learn the importance of integrating all of our students’ cultures and languages in the classroom. In one of my classes, we were asked to create identity texts and I think that they are a great way for teachers to get to know and understand the different backgrounds of each student and get the students to accept other cultures as well.

            Aneta Pavlenko’s The Making of an American: Negotiation of Identities at the turn of the twentieth century analyzed the narrative identities of European immigrants of the twentieth century and their journey to America and autobiographies of immigrants today. She argues that “these memoirs differ from contemporary immigrant autobiographies as far as the relationship between language and identity is concerned, and will attempt to explain the differences through ideologies of language and identity dominant in the early twentieth century,” by showing how sociopolitical, sociohistoric, and sociolinguistic affect how individuals perceive themselves and their language (p. 35). I found it interesting that we can read autobiographies of immigrants and learn a lot about their life, their culture, and their language. The European immigrants discussed what they had to do in order to become assimilated into the “American culture,” learn the language, and how they struggled between losing a part of who they were to fit in. For many of the immigrants in the article, even though they went through Americanization, they still did not feel as though they were Americans. As Constantine Panunzio describes, “I have now been in America for nineteen years; I have grown up here as much as any man can; I have had my education here; I have become a citizen….I have come to love America as I do my very life- perhaps more arid yet they still call me a 'foreigner,'” (p. 45). As I was reading this article, it got me thinking about what does it means to truly be American? Some refer to America as one big melting pot, but I like to think of America as a salad because there are very distinctive parts of a salad, as with America and the different cultures and languages.

            In the Holliday readings, it focused on how people construct their own identities. For Parisa, she is an Iranian and others often have a stereotypical view of who she is. She had to explain to her colleagues that those stereotypes are not true for all Iranians, which I think is important because it helps other create a non-essentialist view of her culture. Another point in the reading was identity card—“while one person may be exchanging information with another person, they are both, be it intentionally or unintentionally, also sending messages about their cultural identity—about how they want the other person to see them,” (p. 17). I agree that people need to be aware of what they say because someone may see or hear and that can affect how they perceive someone’s cultural identity. As I said before, from my bilingual classes, we have learned the importance of one’s cultural identity and language. As a future teacher, I think that it is important to tell my students’ families that it is important to keep their home culture, while incorporating their new culture and language and by no means should they abandon their home cultures.