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My fragile identity!
Human beings are social animals with the lingering and pervasive urge to form social groups. Abraham Maslow, a renowned Psychologist, defined this urge as “the need of identification.” Identification may take multifaceted expressions in terms of interactions with other individuals, loved ones, family, academic institutions, organizations, society and country. Name that parents assign to us is an expression of our identity which defines our personality throughout the life. In other words, our name is a source that nurtures our sense of identification—the crux of being a social animal.
The book “my name is Maria Isabel” encapsulated the full-fledge description of threat that school offers to Maria Isabel. She is a Hispanic child who is being grown up in United State as an ethnic minority. The story revolves around the circumstances that Maria encounters regarding her identity when her teacher changes her name from Maria to Marry. It offers compelling simulacrum of an experience that follows holistically identical patterns on the part of many language minority children and inspires discussion on the issues of biculturalism and self identity.
Finding two other Marias in the class, her teacher suggests “Why don’t we call you Mary instead?” Maria’s language teacher changes her name to Mary due to whom she feels herself possessing an evaporating identity that threatens her self-identity to considerable degree, “Maria Isabel taught as if she was caught in a spider-web of her own, more she tried to lose, more she felt trapped.”
Her wish to maintain her identity gets revealed when her teacher asks the class to write an essay on the topic, “My Greatest Wish” where she writes, “my greatest wish is to be called María Isabel Salazar López.” This warm yet sentimental story attempts to capture the genuine and unparallel flavor of Latino culture and significance of “name” for Latino children in synchronizing their cultural heritage and identity.
Works cited
Ada, Alma F, Kathryn D. Thompson, and Ana M. Cerro. My Name Is María Isabel. New York: Atheneum, 1993. Print.
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