Growing up, I have always seen culture as an important element in someone’s life. In my opinion, your culture is how you define who you are and everything you believe in. The culture someone may choose to identify themselves with may or may not be the culture in which they were raised. It is my personal belief that an individual could create their own culture by adapting different culture norms they are actually willing to accept and pass on to future generations. Within various cultural identities there are good traditional elements and some traditional elements that some individuals would prefer to break away from, causing modifications of various cultures. In regard to my culture, I would identify as a first generation Puerto Rican-American.…show more content… My parents were both from a large family and they decided to leave their native island to come to America to better their financial situations. With migrating a far distance form their native land, my parents did not adjust well to the American culture. In her work Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race, Wendy Roth describes how when trying to confine to a different culture, there are many elements to take into consideration. “Cultural assimilation means learning how a society is organized and how to behave within the according to its rules, norms, and expectations.”(p. 62). According to Roth, there is another concept that immigrates experience, “Racial acculturation involves adopting and using conceptions of race that predominate in the new society and structuring one’s behavior and interactions according to the implied relations between racial groups.”(p.…show more content… It has made me a little more sensitive in the regards of how others in the room may feel. I never wanted to make someone feel as if they are less competent then I am. Whenever I visit my family in Puerto Rico, it is important that I only speak Spanish, especially to the elders. It allows them to see that I have been taught manners and am culturally competent enough to understand what it means to be seen as rude. Being raised in a Spanish speaking household, has allowed me to gain knowledge of a second language and be able to interact with others which makes me more profitable to a growing Spanish speaking industry. It also provides me with the opportunity to fully understand the Puerto Rican culture and their language and encounter a firsthand experience of culture