What Makes Ones Identity?

For the past couple of days I've been reading "Made in America" a rather fascinating book about the lives of immigrant students in the American school system. They focus on this one school in California, giving perspectives of the new immigrated ESL students, minority students who are fluent in English and in regular classes, and the "normal" students who are white/black and see themselves as fully American. It was really interesting to see how these three groups of students perceived each other and the school they all attended, and how they all worked to find peace between their ethnic identity, school societal politics, and what they felt was right.

I originally picked up the book because I thought it may help prepare me for when I teach later on by helping me see possible perspectives my students may be coming into my class with, but as I was reading I found myself comparing the students with myself and my friends back when we were in high school. While I think that my school did rather well with integrating the needs of the immigrant students, providing a good number of ESL and bilingual classes, I do remember that some invisible lines were drawn as to where certain students went. For example, I knew not to take Tagalog as my foreign language because I'd be one of the only people in the class who didn't hear it at home, and I was also very aware that while I could take regular Dance PE, I couldn't take Ballet Folklorico no matter how interesting I thought it would be.

While I hung out with a diverse group of friends ethnically speaking, most of the people I spent time with grew up in the same town as me, and those who immigrated to the US acted rather American now that I think about it. I never really thought much about people's ethnic backgrounds til they did something which would remind me of it, like Ashley speaking in Spanish when she called her Mom or Kathy speaking in Tagalog to some of the other girls in our PE class, or when Ly got mad when the teacher didn't talk about the US' Japanese internment camps during WWII.

Thinking back on it now, I wonder what that meant, that I was completely oblivious to the backgrounds of my friends. Either I'm an incredibly oblivious individual, or I live my life assuming that everyone's family is different, so I don't notice cultural differences as I figure it's part of the "everyone's different" aspect of life.