Personal Narrative: Immigrants In America

Improved Essays
Two minutes left in the game and we are a goal away from winning the first game of the season for my sister’s soccer team. The clock is ticking and time is running out. I sprint down the field with the ball as fast as I can when suddenly BAM! Lights out. After a minute of blacking out, all I can hear is screaming and crying with people hovering over me. I open my eyes and I try to talk and move and get back up to keep playing but I cannot. It is like I have forgotten the basic things in life that I learned when I was an infant. I was being shaken, I was dozing off, I could not respond at all. Tears are flooding in the background and I can feel the warm gentle touch of my mother’s hand caress my leg telling me everything was going to be okay. …show more content…
Individuals who are labeled as a “illegal aliens” are often faced with moments of despair where they struggle to find employment, medical insurance, and a home for their family and themselves. At times the barriers become too much to handle that immigrants begin to feel hopeless and alienated from everyone else. According to the Department of Homeland Security there was an estimated 11.4 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States in 2012. This exemplifies the quantity of individuals who struggle with despair because of their cultural clashes with the American culture. Innocent children, men and women are constantly battling for survival in a hostile environment comprised of individuals who ridicule and isolate them based upon their current status. According to a recent study conducted by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, there are 6.8 million Americans who struggle with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, 15 million Americans struggle with Social Anxiety Disorder, 7.7 Million struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Order, and an additional 15 million Americans struggle with Major Depressive Disorder. While documented Americans face these struggles, undocumented Immigrants face these same hardships on a much larger scale based predominantly on their label of an “illegal alien.” The stress caused by their current situation not only exemplifies the amount of …show more content…
Boyle also tend to struggle with despair but ultimately in the end they find the missing key to unlock the chains of despair and be hopeful. Candido was overcome with despair because the protagonists Delaney and Kyra are xenophobic opulent white folks who have a sense of hatred and disgust for the “illegal aliens” Candido and America. Throughout the novel, Kyra and Delaney were irritable with the “illegal aliens.” Kyra protested to get them deported and Delaney was vicious and violent. Between the two of them, they both created such a hatred for Candido and America, that Delaney finally draws the line and wants to do something about it. At the end of the novel, Delaney attempts to murder Candido and America for the vandalism on the wall surrounding the neighborhood, although he knows that they were not the ones who did the crime. He was using that crime as reasoning to commit an even larger crime. The hatred has finally reached the limit and it was time that Delaney served justice to those who dare receive it. However, when a flood of water swept them all away readers are left with a sense of hope that the friendship between Candido and Delaney is restored as Candido reaches out and saves Delaney’s life. Delaney had the choice of taking Candido’s hand and surviving, and neglecting to take his hand and be swept away just like Candido’s daughter. Therefore readers are hopeful that Delaney and

Related Documents

  • Superior Essays

    Why do thousands of people every year immigrate into our country without proper documentation? In a myriad of these cases, the reason is to escape from hardship and suffering. One of the most common regions people emigrate from is Mexico, and the reasons for this are developed within The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande. This book tells the true story of a girl that journeyed to the United States of America with her brother and sister, all as undocumented immigrants, in order to live with their father. The author of this memoir not only explains the privation she dealt with in her home land of Mexico, but she also demonstrates the racial division and other forms of adversity that were present within the United States of America, or El Otro…

    • 1201 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A Hardworking Immigrant Before Ruth Day retired at the age of 75, she was a cashier at a food supermarket called Casey Jones for merely 25 years. Unlike most cashiers, Ruth was a short elderly woman with square-rimmed glasses, aging skin, and grey, curly hair. She knew how to make her workplace seem like a big family. Every customer who walked in the store knew Mrs. Ruth. Once they finished walking the aisles shopping, they instantly looked for register six, where she normally worked, to check out their grocery items.…

    • 1449 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    When my father first immigrated from China to America, he was nervous, bittersweet about leaving his native country, but mostly excited. To him and thousands of others like him, America was a sign of a life of new opportunity. Growing up, my life was a blend of American and Chinese cultures. As a young child, I was always unsure if I was more American or Chinese, or even both. I didn’t feel like I fit into any of those categories.…

    • 608 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Immigrant Family Me,mom,and my newborn sibling were living outside,each one of us trying our very best to survive,except for the baby,of course. Ever since that little devil was born,he got all of the attention. Mom said that i’m “too old” to be treated like a baby. I’m only 8,how am I supposed to take care of myself?If only things were different,I could be the center of attention. Why do I have to live this way?…

    • 406 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    The immigrant story is not necessarily a new narrative, and I have had the privilege of having it easier than some of my peers. However, it is the experience that has revoke the most change within me, both as a person and as an artist. Specifically, fitting into the new life was not difficult. I have managed to relatively seamlessly transition into this new environment. Notwithstanding, there is always an underlying seam of xenophobia within the society, holding me to a higher standard.…

    • 278 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The word “immigrant” is often said with a negative connotation. This is a word I know all too well. I didn't know what an immigrant was until I was probably in the fourth grade when Mexican immigrants were all over the news. Illegal immigrants, the struggle for American citizenship, and the immigrants’ everlasting hope of achieving the American Dream was always part of the headline. I knew my parents weren’t from the United States, but they had adapted well to the country.…

    • 2014 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    My ancestors are immigrants of Ireland. They moved to the United States sometime in the 1800s. My ancestors moved for various reasons. The first reason why my ancestors migrated was because of jobs. They were very poor people from Ireland and wanted to try to escape that.…

    • 308 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Part 4: The two events that caught my attention was when the Americans arrived and how much relief and they were. Some Germans who were alive felt guilty about it because why did were they alive? Were they lucky? There was this one Jewish girl. She wasn't happy when the Americans arrived.…

    • 662 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    My ancestors constantly had to either push against the boundaries discrimination confined them in, or try to hide their culture entirely. This caused their sense of security to deteriorate. This is one of the main differences between my ancestors and I, they lived in fear and struggled because of their identities, whereas I am hardly aware of my own, and society has not forced me to be aware of it, to try to hide it, or to act any differently because of it. When my family immigrated to Canada they changed their name, possibly from Obertas but no one is certain what it originally was, to O’Bertos, to try to mask their Ukrainian heritage. The ones still here are much more concerned and frightened when they see discrimination, whether it is in…

    • 898 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    America has always been a country where immigrants come to look for something better. That may be escaping religion or looking for a better life for them or their family's life. Around 1953 my grandpa went to work in texas. when he was 8 years old, with my great-grandpa (his dad) they worked to send money back to mexico.…

    • 655 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Illegal Immigration Cause

    • 1202 Words
    • 5 Pages

    According to the Department of Homeland Security, 662,483 illegal immigrants were apprehended in 2013, with 64% of those immigrants coming from Mexico. Given this statistic, and that the number of illegal immigrants in America has climbed to nearly eleven million, illegal immigration is not something Americans can just brush under the rug and ignore. The number of immigrants in this country illegally has consistently risen over the past decade. Illegal Immigration in the United States (U.S.) is an austere problem and has multiple underlying causes, such as economic instability among Mexico’s farmers, chain migration, and a confused and corrupt sense of morality of those wishing to migrate and those wishing to employ the migrators; these causes…

    • 1202 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Living in the Canadian society is not the same for everyone. A large amount of it consists of immigrants, which leads us into a multicultural society. How does this affect the people who are born and raised in a different culture? I interviewed my good friend of mine, Djibraan Deelahoo, to see his point of views concerning this situation. Like many other immigrants, he was born outside of Canada.…

    • 1506 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Immigrant Narrative

    • 947 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The immigrant narrative is the central story of the American experience; one whose norms define the variations in American cultural and literary landscape. While no single text tells the whole story of immigration, the larger narrative is always implicit. Examples with variations are provided by any ethnic group whose people write about moving and adapting to America. These migrant stories are narrated in journalism, cinema and fiction in the tradition strategically sentimentalized middle-brow fiction. While policy effects the reality of immigration, the deeper motivations for immigration come from a carefully constructed mythology, one built on both sides of American borderlands and across the globe.…

    • 947 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Today approximately 11.7 Million people today are doing their best to live in the shadows of the United States (Preston). These people are living like second-rate citizens all while constantly having to worry about immigration and customs enforcement (ICE) coming to rip them away from the life they have built here. Many of these immigrants have lived here for years. They have jobs, families and friends. However, because of their legal status, they must fear deportation and cannot participate in elections and social programs.…

    • 1736 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    On the first day of Kindergarten, I remember how my mother held my hand. I remember how, before she kissed me goodbye, she whispered into my ear, “tienes que ser la mejor,” you have to be the best. I was born into a family of hardworking immigrants in a city only an hour away from the Mexican-American border. My parents, worried about the quality of education in the low-income neighborhood that we lived in, had toured schools until they found one that satisfied their expectations.…

    • 1185 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays