Song of the moment: My name is Jonas by Weezer
I finally finished my huge essay for US History. It's due tommorow, and if anyone doesn't turn it in, they don't pass the class. We were given this assignment like two months ago, and I just finished the second half of it. The first half is to talk about the "American Dream" in our family. Even though I hate my mom with great despise most of the time, I do appreciate what she has done for me and my family and I think she deserves this report. But then again, I was originally going to talk about my grandfather, but he died when I was four years old and I didn't feel like calling my grandmother in the Philippines and asking her a bunch of questions about him.
So yeah, here it goes....
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Strength of a Filipina
You don't have to be from America to be the American Dream
By
Miladel Mendador Alba
Harbor High School
Submitted to Mr. Heitz
U.S. History
5/29/03
The “American Dream” is having the drive to do your best to give you and your family the best. If you live in a country where freedom is suppressed and the government has full rights to taking everything you own and worked hard for your entire life, that isn’t the American dream. If you think living in inhumane conditions is “the best” because you can’t find a job that will comfortably support you and your children even if you have a high school and college degree, then you’re wrong. The “best” is having the freedom of speech, being able to defend yourself and others through court, and to just be an American with hopes and dreams that you have actually accomplished through the time you have spent on this rock we call Earth. With the help of the wise teachings of my grandfather and grandmother, my mom thrived to have the best by taking a chance in a foreign country (The U.S.) and winning her way through all obstacles, by accomplishing her true American dream that my siblings and I are currently living, all thanks to her.
My mother, Adelwisa Mendador Alba Lacy Realista, was born in March 12, 1949 in Samar, Philippines. She was the daughter of Filipa and Armado Mendador and had two siblings: one older brother and one older sister; just like me, she was the baby in the family.
My mother has always been the American Dream way before she became an American. When she was in high school in the Philippines, she devoted all of her time in her studies with the help of my grandfather’s wise words, “There is only one thing in this world that no one can take away from you and that is your knowledge. With that, you can do anything you want to do”.
After she graduated high school and college, she started helping my grandfather in his law firm. Before, she was thinking of getting a medical degree so she could become a nurse, but for some reason, my grandfather stopped her. She ended up getting an accounting degree. She started working at a military base in the Philippines.
A little before I was born, my brother was struck with a rare disease that caused his stomach to internally bleed. The doctors in the Philippines weren’t as advance as the ones in the U.S., and they didn’t know that much about the disease that he had. Before my mom was able to go to California to try to become a citizen so that my siblings and me can move here, the doctors in the Philippines had to conduct a surgery on him twice. He was throwing up blood almost every day. The surgeons took out his spleen, which we later found out after getting medical help in the U.S., that that wasn’t necessary.
Although, before we ended up moving here, my mom was almost at the deadline date of the expiration of her tourist Visa. She had a very limited time to find a U.S. citizen to get married to so that she can be a citizen herself. Luckily, she met my step-dad, Charles M. Lacy through a mutual friend of theirs. He was handicapped and already divorced and he really didn’t want to end up being in a retirement home, so they decided to scratch each others’ back—my mom, taking care of him while he became the bridge between her and citizenship.
After piles and piles of paperwork and years of hard labor in Santa Cruz Counties accounting, my mom finally saved up enough money to send me, my brother, my sister, aunt and grandmother to the U.S. My mom and step-dad bought a condo near 7th Avenue, and we lived there for about three years. Between ’97 and ’98, my family was going through financial problems, and we were almost forced to file for bankruptcy. My mom couldn’t handle taking care of my disabled step-dad anymore, so sadly, she put him in a retirement home and divorced him. She still visited him every week and stayed in touch with him, but what kind of angered me a little was the fact the she sort of used him and his citizenship just for me and my siblings. Although, all she wanted was for us to have a better chance at life, so what seemed like a very selfish thing to do actually became somewhat un-selfish. I guess it was just a strategic move in this life of chess. Sadly, my step-dad died of pneumonia shortly after they divorced.
We ended up moving a lot on my first year at Shoreline Middle School (’98). We lived a few years with one of my mom’s friends, a few months at some apartment, another couple of months at another apartment, until we finally found the current townhouse that we live in today. My mom has stayed being an accountant for Santa Cruz County, but she also took another accounting job on the side for Orange County and another side-job in which she would deliver Filipino boxes from homes around the Bay Area to San Jose.
Just a couple of years ago, my mom decided to marry an old friend of her and my real dad, Nilo Alba, back in the Philippines. My new step-dad’s name is Alexander Realista. My mom married him because she feels like she’s getting too old and she tells me that her “time” might come sometime soon, and she wanted to leave me and my siblings with someone to take care of us when she’s gone. This time, I sense a lot more love between her and Alexander, compared to her and my first step-dad. Even though Alex ended up moving to Las Vegas because he felt like he could get a better job there, they still visit each other and talk to each other on the phone everyday. In fact, my mom would go there for 1-2 weeks at a time just to spend time with him. She says that she wants to move there after she is able to retire from her job.
My life may not be perfect, My family may not be millionaires and I might not even have my own car until I’m 19, but considering the things that my mom did just to get me this far is pretty amazing. Looking back at the pain that she endured—physically and emotionally, it makes me want to cry every time I catch myself talking back to her, or giving her less than the respect that she deserves.
She has always been a wonderful mother and an honest citizen. She doesn’t even let me make fun of America and its greed to keep all of the up-rising countries around the world under control before one of them can take over America, because she says that America is good and I should always be grateful that I am living here. She is constantly reminding me of how lucky I am, while at the same time, to never forget where I came from. Her own words of wisdom and her constant strength are what make her the real American Dream.
U.S. Immigration
Immigration to the United States has a lot of requirements that may be confusing to people from different countries, and they either get through all of the physicals and the green cards and the citizenship forms, but some of them either have no patience, they don’t know how, or aren’t able to fill out the proper requirements for citizenship and just try to get to the United States illegally.
David Reimers, author of Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America (1992) and All the Nations Under Heaven: An Ethnic and Racial History of New York City (1996), has produced a useful seven-chapter book that reviews four major types of restrictionist groups: those concerned about the population/environment; rule-of-law opponents of illegal immigration; economic arguments that immigration hurts similar US workers; and those who worry that today's immigrants will not easily be integrated. Reimers concludes that immigration will continue to be debated, as restrictionists and admissionists selectively cite data and studies to support their positions, so that the US is destined to "produce ad hoc immigration policies, just as it has in the past."(p154).
In 1875, the US Supreme Court held that only the federal government could regulate immigration, and there followed a series of qualitative exclusions--there were no numerical limits on immigration, but an ever-lengthening list of Chinese, communists, prostitutes and others were barred.
Abuse of the system in the subject of immigration is very common. In 1965, amendments substituting family and economic preferences for the national origins system opened the front door of legal immigration to Asians, and forced Mexicans and other Latin Americans into the US through the back door (p. 69). This is not quite right. There were no per-country limits on Mexico or other Western Hemisphere countries until 1978, and apprehensions did not rise sharply in the 1960s despite a booming economy. Today, hundreds of thousands of immigrants enter the U.S. a year.
Due to the immense amount of immigration, the United States has become the land of diversity. People from all over the world leave their homeland to journey to the United States. The United States is like a person where people are pieced together by their experiences. Every single person who has lived in America has added his or her patch to the red, white, and blue quilt. Each patch is a story. Without one patch the entire quilt would be different. The immigrants had drastic affects on the United States and the United States in return, had extreme influences on the immigrants. For my family, being robbed at a gunpoint was the incentive for my parents to progress to a securer atmosphere. Through the past nine years my experiences that dealt with the differences in: culture, importance of religion and value of a family has molded me in to the being that I am today.
Our country was built from the immigration of people from an international array of backgrounds. However, multitudes of white supremacists blame their persona as well as economic misfortunes on an abundance of ethnic groups. African-Americans, Muslims and Jews are only some of the groups tormented by these white supremacists. It was very awkward for me to be in a new country and I felt alone and vulnerable, but having to deal with a culture where people are discriminated against was an even more overwhelming experience for me. But due to the high numbers of immigrants, America has been transformed in to a melting pot where our society has become a lot more tolerant to different attitudes and ideas. It is this type of acceptance that baffled me the most when I first set foot here on a cold, cloudy morning. Back home in the Philippines, my acceptance of others differed tremendously from my beliefs today. I have learned that to be accepted in a culture, you must be able to accept the culture first. By excepting this boundless culture and conforming my self to it, I have seen much more tolerance in the people around me. Now I feel a part of the society and with that comes the sense of security that I lacked in my homeland. Although I am a member of the Filipino culture, my identity grew out of my desires for freedoms unique to American culture. Therefore, I believe my identity is not a result of either Filipino or American cultures but out of a personal desire for setting my own limits.
Bibliography<
-Interview with my mom, Adelwisa Realista on April 26th, 2003
-Phone interview with my grandmother from Manila, Philippines with my mother on April 27th, 2003
-Reimers, David M. 1998. Unwelcome Strangers: American Identity and the Turn Against Immigration. New York. Columbia University Press. http://www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup
-Gimpel, James G. and James R. Edwards, Jr. 1999. The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform. Needham Heights, MA. Allyn & Bacon. http://www.abacon.com
-US Immigration online (information on green cards, Visas, government forms). http://www.usaimmigrationservice.org/v.htm
-US Immigration.com http://www.us-immigration.com/
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All in all along with the proper title page and the double space magic, this essay come to a total of 9 pages. I know I blog waaaaay more than this and it would only take me like, a half an hour to do it, but writing these essays actually requires research and THINKING. I don't even think half of the time I'm blogging. I just type down whatever comes to mind, and I type way faster when I don't have to think. I don't even need to think, my fingers just do the shit for me. Taking that keyboarding class in Freshman year and playing the piano pays off, because it gets you to type a LOT faster. I can type my final draft essays during lunch, and still turn it in on time for my next class.
This is basically my academic life this semester: I slack off as much as I can, do make up work and just tell my teachers that I was absent on the days that I didn't turn the work in, and I get A's. It's a good trick for those that are extremely lazy on most days, and feel like work on
some days. I can work hard as a fucker and have the drive to do so like, one day a week and I'm basically just lifeless and slack off on the remainding days of the week. Today is actually my slacker day, but the thought of not passing US History is a little scary, and that's enough to get me to do this shitty essay. Don't get me wrong or anything.. I LOVE to write and other than mathematics, I highly excel on my ability to write, it's just the thinking part and the writers block that annoys me. I get annoyed very easily, not only from other people, but towards myself as well.
I'm so tired right now, I don't even want to hand-revise and edit it for grammar corrections. When I finished doing the Bibliography, I was like,
"Fuck reading over this shit. I'll just use the automated Spelling and grammar check."
I'm a lazy little schizophrenic child.
Bah. I'm drawing a "/" mark on what I'm going to be doing after high school. Part of me wants to major in law, go to Santa Clara State and become a lawyer, but the other more childish dream I have is going to UCSC to major in Astrophysics and become an Astronomer or something. I've always loved Astronomy. I would check out every single book in the Library about the planets in our Solar System and all of this Astronomy stuff when I was just 8 years old. It fascinated me back then, and it still fascinates me. I may not love biological science, but astronomical sciences is just.... jaw dropping amazing.
I have guitar lessons this Friday at 5:30. I have to go to the music place to get my acoustic fixed either today or tommorow. One of the strings kind of broke off, so yeah. *yawn* I'm going to go now and practice my piano. I might read my book afterwards, if I'm not sleepy. See ya.
