Community Identity

In the interview that I conducted about myself inside my community I have found out a few different things that I did not necessarily think about before I gave out the interview. I realized after the interview that the community I lived in was very culturally diverse. I lived in a town that was half Mexican and as a teenager growing up there, my school was fifty percent Hispanic. In my community, the education was not very high leveled compared to the rest of the United States according to the interview. As a part of my community I can relate to Gerald Graff’s short story about his troubles with reading as a teenager. As a teenager for me, reading was never a first priority and that also seemed to be the norm within my community as the same with Graff’s. He said that people would sometimes beat people up due to their intelligence, although that is not the case within my community, most people didn’t read though. The average student in my town had around a 2.8, didn’t read and also, sadly enough didn’t care. School for a lot of people was never a first priority. Gerald Graff seems to have grown up in a town that education was also not most teenager’s first priority.

The community I have chosen is my own community that I lived in right before I went to college, specifically Escondido, CA or San Diego. It was the place that I really developed who I am and when people ask me where I am from I always affiliate myself with San Diego, CA even though it is not the place that I was originally “from.” Everything about who I was when I first lived in New Jersey and then moved to California has changed because of the environment and community I lived within in Escondido. All of my friends that I will always be friends with and stay in close contact with are from my high school and I really developed the person that I am because of the people I surrounded myself in. So far I have learned that the reason that I make all the choices I do is because of how I saw my surroundings in a new area do it. In California the atmosphere is very relaxed and laid back and I now realize that that is how I am. I am of course like that because all of my friends are like that. People don’t realize how much of an influence all of your friends can be but they really are the biggest influence on you. I have not gathered a lot of information about my community from other people or artifacts yet so my insight might not be very detailed but this is the info I gathered from easy general knowledge of my community.