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| Re: What's Sonia Sotomayor's racial background? (457290) | |||
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Re: What's Sonia Sotomayor's racial background? |
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Posted by GP38/R42 Chris on Wed Jun 3 06:34:25 2009, in response to Re: What's Sonia Sotomayor's racial background?, posted by SMAZ on Tue Jun 2 03:27:57 2009. My mother never took the classes but she learned an accentless English from TV, neighbors and doing the "mom thing" (school, shopping, etc).That's EXACTLY how my mom, grandmother, and aunts and uncles learned English. it was the 1950's, they didn't have a pot to piss in when they came off the boat (literally), but the first thing my grandfather did was buy a TV for them, and yes, that's how they learned English. That's the advantage of a diverse area like LIC/Astoria versus ethnic enclaves like Bensonhurst. And this was in the then rural outpost of Suffolk County. My aunt who was a teenager when she came from Italy took ESL at LIC HS and then graduated with flying colors. She helped teach my parents and my brother. My mother and aunts and uncles were all teenagers when they came here, and only my oldest uncle knew broken English when they got here. They didn't have Dutch "ESL" classes. My grandmother never learned it well and failed her citizenship test even though she was the most "American" of them all. She remembers when Italy was a third-world country and never took prosperity for granted. My grandmother did learn English, and spoke it well, although as she aged, she began going back, and spoke sort of half Dutch/Half English, but that had to do with age, as she did speak it well until she got into her 90's. All my aunts and uncles, as well as my mother and grandfather became citizens....my grandmother is the only one that didn't. My parents came here because they liked America but were doing well in Italy anyway. My mother's side of the family left Holland because it was pretty bad there after the German occupation during WWII, and the aftermath of the war. They had it "pretty good" there compared to others, but still chose to come here. Interestingly, while they worked like dogs, they were quite poor here. Strangely, Holland began to get better right around when they left, as did much of Europe, but they struggled hard here, but they did eventually make it. Hard workers. |
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