In the years of being in high school, it is rough for many teenagers. Even though many people think that it is harder for minorities to succeed, I think that it is hard for everyone. I am a mix of Caucasian and Peruvian; I deal with many obstacles of both majorities and minorities. Every student deals with the pressures of being an adolescent. They end up dealing with alienation, peer pressure, prejudice, competition, and many other conflicts. But people think that since we are in the United States, more Caucasians will have better and bigger opportunities. Minorities, people that look or are from a different descent other than Caucasian, are both alienated and brought upon prejudice. They go through a lot of competition from both their own race, and also with others; whereas the Caucasians compete with each other. Minorities have to go through all the work because it seems like nothing is handed to them. I think that every student deserves to be heard, and should never be taken for granted, because we are the future, and all of us are one race, that is the human race. The students should be heard from their mind, instead of judged by the way they look or where they are from, because soon there will be no such thing as minorities anymore, and this country will have the same or more of another race or ethnicity, other than the majority, Caucasians.
Little by little, more and more immigrants are coming into this country where they start off with nothing. In the case of my father, he is Peruvian and came here with virtually nothing, except his mind. To people here a Peruvian education was nothing. They would barely hire him anywhere. Luckily he had learned English very well in Peru and had become an English professor there, so English was not his problem. Instead, it was the way he looked, and his inexperience of working in the United States. As he kept looking for a job, he finally was offered a job at a company named National, where he was a computer worker, where he was not even noticed. Later he started speaking up, and having to show other workers how to work the systems. Finally, the director of the company noticed him and fired the manager, who was Caucasian, and hired my dad to be the manager of operations. Then a very well known company named YADE started fighting for my father to come work for them, and they said that they would pay him triple what National was paying him, so he took the job at YADE. Then after a few years working with YADE he became director of one of the companies. After learning how to operate a company alone, he started to think about opening a school of his own. So he opened American Pacific College, his first school in Van Nuys. Later he ended up doing really well with his school and decided to open more and more. Now he owns 5 schools, all in California, one more in Palmdale, East Los Angeles, West Los Angeles, and Farmersville, and he is about to open one in Mexico City. One other company he was able to invest in was a dental clinic. In all of these places he gave my family jobs after coming here from Peru. These schools are for minorities with some sort of disability to get a job, and after a while in the school my father finds them all jobs. Like my father little by little the minorities of this country will overpopulate the non-minorities, and people will no longer be categorized.
My mother was born in Germany, but she was raised in the United States. She was only born in Germany because of the job her father had, where they had to live during the year she was born. Her whole life she has been very in touch with Latin American Studies and very against categorizing of minorities. In college she majored in Latin American Studies, and lived in Peru for a few years. She is now a teacher at Edison Elementary School, because she teaches a class for students that are fairly behind in school where maybe they have never even gone to school before, and their parents never thought school was important for them. Her entire class consists of minorities. And it's not because of laziness; it's because of what the society does to these kids and to their families. My mom is teaching these kids not to listen to other people who teach them not to succeed, and getting these kids back on track. With a lot of work and effort these kids will become part, and be the equalizers of this country, and become the majority instead of minority. These kids will be heard, and will be our better and brighter future.
In my case I went to Edison School, where there was a great mixture of races, and was very diverse, and every one seemed equal. Later I went to John Adams and it became a bigger place with a lot more people, but here the races began to start to split up. I noticed that there was not a single group with many races; they were all separated into large groups of the same race. Then in SAMOHI there was still a lot of separation, but more combining of races together. I have had to deal with administrators, and elderly people who discriminate against me sometimes because of my name, or because of the way I look. Sometimes people put me down for being Caucasian, while at the same time they confuse me for being Latina. Soon there will be many mixed people like me and there will no longer be discrimination. Soon everyone will be equal, instead of alienated for being different. Everyone deserves to be treated equally; academically, physically, mentally, and everywhere life may take them.
