"We're moving to another city, Nataly..." I still remember hearing my mother saying these words like it was yesterday. I knew we had fallen into a really bad place financially, but I didn't think it was bad enough to the point that my parents had to sell the Condo in Montebello that we were living in. We ended up moving to the city of El Sereno, where we currently still live. My mom was able to get a job as an apartment manager which was very convenient for us at the time because she didn't have to pay rent since she was working for the company. Moving day came, and I remember driving into the city of El Sereno and just looking around at the streets and the small businesses covered in graffiti that lined the block. At first glance I knew this neighborhood was going to be much different from the living style my family and I were used to. I was nine years old and it was easy to be quickly influenced by others around me but I knew that I had to choose to decide whether I allowed the people in the neighborhood to influence me for the better or for the worst.
Growing up my family would usually move around from one place to another. I was used to hearing that we were packing up and moving away, but we always moved into really nice high low-income middle class neighborhoods such as Korea Town, Montebello, and Bakerfield. I was used to feeling safe around my community and being able to walk out on the block without my mom worrying too much about me. I never worried about having to walk on broken pavement and tripping over it if I wasn't paying close attention. So it was very new for me to pack up and move into a really low-income neighborhood such as El Sereno that is full of gangsters and dirty streets. It was not only new to me but it was also new to my family, we were always used to going out for walks around the block at night or just driving around the neighborhood with no worries. But it all drastically changed when we moved into the city of El Sereno, we had been in the neighborhood before to visit family but we never saw us living here until we were hit financially when the economy dropped during and many jobs were lost during 2007-2008. In the song "No Church in the Wild", written by Kanye West, it explains the lives that gangsters carry threw out their life, the oppression they feel within the neighborhood and what they do as a way to manifest themselves such as taking control over their neighborhoods and create fear within the people. Kanye mentions how people in these neighborhood start to live under their own set of rules because there being dictated by a group, "Human being in a mob... [form] a new religion" (West."No Church in the Wild". Roc-A-Fella Records.2012) This illustrates how the people living in this neighborhood have created their own set of rules to follow in order to stay out of trouble with the gangs, as well as the rules gangs have set for themselves and the people around them. This was relatively new to my family, we never had to oblige under a set of rules in order to stay safe within our neighborhood. We had to learn what streets were off limits for us at certain times and started to follow a curfew that was implemented by the gang members around my neighborhood if you didn't want to end up being shot on accident.
Regardless of what this neighborhood was, we had to continue living our lives as normal as possible. I was enrolled into the nearest public school, Sierra Vista Elementary, which was just down the block from where I lived. I started to attend that school already half way through the second semester which made it a lot harder to make friends since everyone was already comfortable with their group. It was already hard enough moving into a completely new neighborhood and now I had to try to make a new group of friends or at least one friend to get me through the semester. As much as I tried fitting in with the kids at the school I wasn't able to. I spent the last 3 months of school sitting by myself at lunch and watching everybody play with their friends during recess. I felt no connection whatsoever to any of the kids in the school. Everyone just seemed to have a very aggressive and strong attitude and personality. I was completely different, I cared for my studies and I liked sitting in front of the class and playing with everybody during recess. I started to feel very isolated and excluded from my classmates, it was a completely new feeling to not have a single friend. In The Streets, the author, Jorge Luis Borges writes a poem describing his neighborhood in the city of Bueno Aires. Throughout the stanzas Borges explains how he is connected to his neighborhood spiritually "My soul is in the streets of Buenos Aires." Borges felt a strong connection with his neighborhood and his community that he felt it was a piece of who he was. Unlike me I felt completely unconnected to my neighborhood.
The only connection I seemed to have with my neighborhood was financially and having family with the same imigrational status here in the U.S. But even with these two connections I still felt completely un-relatable with everybody around me. I soon came to realize that the people in my neighborhood were actually used to living in poverty and having this type of life style so they didn't really seem to bother wanting to escape it. My family on the other hand wasn't used to living in these type of circumstances, we were working hard to get back on our feet again; and we did. Seeing the comfort of these people living in poverty and in a beat down neighborhood motivated me to work hard in school. I was scared of being too comfortable in this community to the point of not wanting to leave. Like in Tattoos on the Heart, the author, Gregory Boyle, explains the struggles and experiences of gang members he has come across in his lifetime. Boyle explains how he helped many homies realize that there is a better life out there besides living in low-income and gang infested neighborhoods. I felt a connection with one of the homies, Speedy. He was a really well known gangster for always getting into trouble but Boyle helped him realize he had to pursue a better life for himself "...Speedy moved away from the projects...and [was] surprised...where his story [had] taken him."(Boyle p 58,60). His life toke a positive turn once he moved out of the projects and into a different neighborhood, he found a job in an oil refinery in Richmond, got married, and had three children that he loved reading with and spending time. Like Speedy I hope to move away from this neighborhood and better myself as a person, and look back at this past experience and say that it influenced me to want a better life for myself and for my family.
Fig.1. Palm Trees in El Sereno Image by Waltar, Flicker. Taco Friendly parklet. 2013.
I personally connect to the Palm Trees that fill the city of El Sereno because they are a representation of myself and my family. Palm trees are a symbol of overcoming and resurrection. They grow out surpassing everything beneath them. I see myself as these palm trees. I'm trying to grow and reach out of this neighborhood like these palm trees. I want to start of my growth from the very low and be able to over pass this obstacle of living in this neighborhood. These palm trees are also a symbol of my family because palm trees are also considered a foreign plant that was brought over from Mexico and other islands. I consider my family and I as being foreigners to this neighborhood. We moved over for economical reasons and stand out from the rest because of our customs and beliefs are very different from the rest of the neighborhood. As a family we didn't allow the neighborhood of El Sereno to influence us negatively or change our beliefs. Instead to push us to reach out to be the best we could.
I eventually found my escape from the neighborhood of El Sereno. I started to attend school in the next city over, Alhambra. Alhambra was a city I was able to connect with and find a sense of community even though I didn't personally live in that city. I attended school in the city of Alhambra from middle school to high school and made very close connections with many people in that neighborhood. I was finally able to find a sense of belonging with people that had similar values and perspectives as mine. I was able to find friends and people that included me with them instead of isolating me. This was my way of being one step closer to getting out of the city I didn't want to belong to. I was able to be greatly influenced by many amazing teachers I met over the course of years and mentors that pushed me to pursue my dream of college. Which led me to be where I currently am right now, California State University of Los Angeles. This has helped me find myself as a person as well as the community I truly feel I belong too.
We decide whether we want to allow our neighborhood to influence us for the better or the worst. I chose to not allow my neighborhood to influence me negatively because I knew what life style I would have if I allowed gang related affiliation into my life. Instead I saw my neighborhood as a way of helping me influence my decision of wanting to better myself as an individual and wanting a better life for myself and for my family. As well as learning how to take the positive from the negative and make the best of it.
Works Cited
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Streets.1969
Boyle, Gregory. Tattoos on the Heart. Free Press, 2010
West, Kanye. "No Church in the Wild." Watch the Throne. Rock-A-Fella
The Internet is still only an infant child compared to the time line of human activity on Earth, and with technology advancing every day, there are endless possibilities as to what it can do in the future. However, with every positive innovation, there may be a negative consequence lurking in the background. Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” explains the many kind of dangers that may occur from people putting their full dependence on the Web, like lowering out capacity of concentration during research. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Associate Professor of German Studies and History at the University of Virginia, Chad Wellmon, counters many points stated by Carr concerning the Internet, pointing out how it is up to the beholder to make the Internet an intellectual tool or a harmful pass time in his article, “Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid… or Smart”. Along with every young child born today who are nearly guaranteed to have access through their phones or computers, the Internet is slowly making its way into everybody’s life around the globe. With that being said, it is certainly easy for people to take side on the matter of whether the Web justifies its deceptions by how useful it is to everybody’s daily life. The Internet is a young, confused child as those who build it and essentially ‘raise it’ decide what it can do for the human population and although some may view it as a harmful tool meant to lower our critical thinking skills, it is necessary to remember that it is up to the beholder to navigate the ‘Information Superhighway’ responsibly in order to retain those skills in the future.
The Internet, in its current state, can be a very scary place. Aside from the countless amounts of articles that can be found concerning strange conspiracies or scary tales, there are mass amounts of web pages and dangerous hyperlinks that exist and can’t even viewed on a conventional search engine. The Deep Web is filled with strange sites that exist for dark reasons, like illegal black marketing, and contains an enormous amount of URL’s that may potentially invite viruses and hackers into permanent residency in the user’s devices. Another point, which may be more appropriate to the typical person, is the danger of depending on technologies that use the Internet. As students look up the answers to questions on their study guides moments before taking a test or while the manly husband tries to do some house repair with Google at their side making sure that they are doing each step correctly, our dependency on prior knowledge is slowly decaying while the dependency on search engines increases. Carr explains what the Internet may do when he says that, “As we are drained of our ‘inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance’…we risk turning into ‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button” (Carr 8). It would be a complete tragedy if, for a time, somebody didn’t have access to the Web due to connection problems when they really needed it and had no alternatives due to full dependency. While the people with pessimistic views on the Web explain the dangers of turning into the Borg from Star Trek, others are taking a more optimistic approach.
The World Wide Web is essential to our everyday life, bringing us closer to people we care about and providing useful, along with useless information at the click of a button, and it is safe to assume that the younger generations are guaranteed to love it. As a young adult, I can’t live a day without a phone in my hand or a laptop on my lap. Without the Web, we would still be stuck researching a top through a wide array of books containing scattered information from different point of views rather than searching an article or watching a documentary online that talks about the key points about what we were searching for in the first place. We would need to constantly wait for an opportunity to contact somebody until they were available for a phone call rather than message them immediately through text or email. Yes, there are some dangers of information overload with regards to research, but the same can be expected from reading several books that over the same information. Wellmon backs up this point by explaining that, “In this sense, technology is neither an abstract flood of data nor a simple machine-like appendage subordinate to human intentions, but instead the very manner in which humans engage the world” (Wellmon 69).
The recurring question that Wellmon and Carr try to answer is whether the World Wide Web is making us knowledgeable beings or mindless drones. Is Google taking away our ability to think critically, or is the point of the matter that we simply don’t need to think critically anymore? For example, as a college student majoring in Engineering, it would be hard to believe that I don’t solve even the simplest of problems without a good amount thorough, critical thinking, and you would be right, but there are a countless amount of times where having to critically think is clearly unnecessary and therefore inefficient to exert effort for due to that fact that I can simply look up the best solution to said problem and follow procedures easily through a step by step process that doesn’t require any amount of critical reading at all. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when someone has already done the work for me, right? Wellmon continues this thought by stating, “The digital world will become a “single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas,” a form of knowledge without distinctions or differences” (Wellmon 67-68). Having the Internet allows us to skip doing the dirty work and does not make us lose our ability to critically think, it just allows us to save our efforts for when it really matters. On the other hand, an incredible amount of time can be spent using the Web as a way to distract one’s self from problems they wish not to deal with at the time. For example, I watched YouTube videos, movies, gameplay, and all sorts of entertainment provided by the wide array of sources that the Internet has to offer rather than spending my time on things that really matter. Carr explains how nifty the Net can be in “diffusing your concentration” explaining that, “When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed” (Carr 4-5). The distractions that the Web has to offer are quite a threat to a person’s way of critical thinking. But the Internet doesn’t simply spam a user with videos of cute puppies and kitties unless the user wished to view them in the first place.
Whether one agrees with Carr or Wellmon, like mentioned earlier, it is still too early to create an opinion on the incredible potential of the internet. Sure, our current version is full of deception and possible dangers that range from threatening viruses to distractions that can last the whole weekend, but with proper education on how to properly handle the Net and when to use it, people will be able to live in perfect harmony with the technologies that surround them. After many more countless years of hard work in perfecting the Internet and making it assessable to anyone and everyone, humans should be on the next evolutionary path to become superior, more efficient beings in the world to come.
Works Cited
Wellmon, Chad. "Why Google Isn't Making Us Stupid...or Smart." The Hedgehog Review. 14.1: (Spring 2012), 66-80. WEB. 07 Mar. 2017.
Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, July/August 2008, 1-8. PDF. 07 Mar. 2017.
Education is the pathway towards having a successful life. It can provide you your dream job, a comfortable lifestyle, prove others wrong who said you’ll never make it, or set the example for younger siblings on what you can accomplish. Malala Yousafzai’s view is that every girl that is deprived of education deserves the right to learn. Our voice is the most powerful weapon we have and should be able to speak out for what’s right. Malala Yousafzai emphasizes that “one child, one teacher and the use of a book, paper, and pen can change the world.” Here in the United States we take education for granted. Many students wake up every morning and dread coming to school. They don’t realize that there’s many people that don’t have that privilege and would love an opportunity to learn and attend school to receive the education they dream of.
Malala Yousafzai was born on July 12, 1997, in Mingora, Pakistan. As a child, she became an advocate for girls’ education, which resulted in the Taliban issuing a death threat against her. On October 9, 2012, a gunman shot Malala when she was traveling home from school. She survived, and has continued to speak out on the importance of education. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2013. In 2014, she was nominated again and won, becoming the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Although Malala was in critical condition having to be in a coma for at least a week, that did not stop her from fighting for what she believed was right. The lifestyle she was intended to live turned out to be the complete opposite. Instead of serving her father and brothers for a lifetime, she achieved and strived for greater goals.
In the book “I Am Malala” by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb, Malala shares a part of her childhood. “We all played cricket on the street or rooftops together, but I knew as we got older the girls would be expected to stay inside. We’d be expected to cook and serve our brothers and fathers. While boys and men could roam freely about town, my mother and I could not go out without a male relative to accompany us, even if it was a five-year-old boy!” (Ch.1pg.26) This was the typical Pakistani tradition. Following tradition was something all girls were forced to do. If they broke those traditions, they knew the consequences they had to face. In the Pakistan culture, it dictates that women are born to follow tradition and honor men. Women that oppose are considered dangerous, rebellious, and often immoral, which is why many Pakistani women are subjected to horrifying bestiality and horror crimes. Women are tortured, but the form of torture is not confined to mere slapping, hitting, and kicking. They are shot, vaginally electrocuted, raped or brutally disfigured. Malala’s father, Ziauddin Yousafzai let her be anything she wanted to become. Malala decided at a very early age she wouldn’t become the typical Pakistan housewife for all her life. If this were to be the path Malala would’ve taken, she would’ve sacrificed her way of living now to simply staying at home cooking and serving her father and brothers. The day Malala has children of her own to care for and a husband she’d obey is what will remain for the rest of her life. No accomplishments, just duties to get done. Her father always said, “Malala will be free as a bird” (Ch.1pg26). She broke tradition, fought for what was right, and her father motivated and encouraged her along the way. Though what she fought for ended up getting shot in the face, she recovered and to this day continues to prove the Taliban wrong.
As a child, I was told that if I graduated from college I would become successful. Yet, no one told me about the obstacles I’d be facing along the way. Going to school wasn’t a problem at that time because I always looked forward to learning about new topics, seeing my friends, and playing when it was time for recess. Throughout my elementary years, my mother would scold my siblings and me for watching too much television. She would lecture us on the importance of learning how to speak the English language fluently and tell us to read a book instead. I love reading but it specifically had to be something I was interested in. Weeks later after she had scolded us for watching too much television, my mother canceled cable television and from then on everyone was required to read. My sibling’s and I were expected to know our times tables fluently and would be tested by my father. If we’d make a mistake for any reason, we would have to repeat them over again and my father would add a house chore after house chore if we didn’t say them correctly.
When I got to the 7th grade I knew I didn’t want to continue studying. I just wanted to stay at home, surf the web, and take naps. I didn’t want to go to school anymore because it was the same usual routine; get up early in the morning, attend class before 8 a.m., stay at school for up to seven hours, then head back home. I hadn’t even reached high school yet and I was already considering dropping out. My mother and father changed that for me. I understood then why my father put so much pressure on me to learn mathematics and my mother for making me read so much. Was I about to throw all that knowledge away? Other students don’t have that father or mother to encourage them to do well in school. Either they end up on the streets having no one to guide them towards the right direction or they turn out to become no one in life. My parents told me that if I continued my education I would provide them and myself with much more than what they provided me. I agreed and realized that they were right. With an education, I can aim to get my dream job and if I’m hired I’ll make money and therefore give my children what my parents couldn’t give me.
I’d say that Malala and I share some similarities that have happened through our lifetime. Malala Yousafzai is only a year older than I am, she was raised by both parents and has siblings she can talk to about anything. We both are striving for that specific goal we have set for ourselves. She has accomplished many goals so far but doesn’t settle for less. She has risked her life for many girls deprived of education and those girls now look up to Malala for being such a brave advocate. Nonetheless, Malala’s parents were the ones that never gave up on her aspirations. The advocating should’ve stopped the day Malala got shot in the face. But, that didn’t stop Malala and although her parents were worried sick they did nothing but support her ambitions for the future. I’m grateful to have both of my parents supporting me and encouraging me to go further than my boundaries. Malala’s story has helped me realize how my parents have helped me throughout my education. By supporting me and always motivating me to do more than can be done.
In conclusion, after reading about Malala Yousafzai memoir, my personal views of education have indeed reshaped my understanding of education. I knew that in some countries girls must obey tradition by not being educated and are only to serve their family and family of their own. I did not know that it only took one girl to speak up for many young girls deprived of education, which resulted in Malala getting shot in the face by the Taliban. She recovered and as soon as she had enough strength to fight back she became advocating worldwide about the importance of girls’ education. Malala’s story is very inspiring because it reminds me that anything is possible. She had a dream and accomplished that by fighting for what she believed was right with the support of her parents. I use to complain when I was younger how difficult school was but look how far I’ve come. Completing college and receiving my bachelor’s degree is just one step closer to fulfilling my dream of getting a job with the Federal Aviation Administration to become an Air Traffic Controller. I’m privileged to be in the place I am today. I must give it to my previous teachers for teaching me so much throughout the years, but most importantly my parents for never giving up on me, always motivating and encouraging me throughout my education. Education is indeed a pathway to a successful life.
Work Cited
Yousafzai, Malala, and Christina Lamb. I am Malala: the girl who stood up for education and was shot by the Taliban. Web.15 Mar.2017.
Kettler, Sara. "Malala Yousafzai." Biography.com. A&E Networks Television, 22 Nov. 2016. Web. 15 Mar. 2017.
The Ellen Show. YouTube. YouTube, 09 Sept. 2015. Web. 08 Apr. 2017.
"A Daughter Is Born." I Am Malala. London, United Kingdom: Orion, 2014. 13-26. Print.