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"Ethnic" Los Angeles

Comparative Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality

Anne Cong-Huyen, Thania Lucero, Joyce Park, Constance Cheeks, Charlie Kim, Sophia Cole, Julio Damian Rodriguez, Andrea Mora, Jazz Kiang, Samantha Tran, Katie Nak, Authors

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Damian

I was born in Oaxaca, Mexico where I lived with my mother and my two older
brothers after my father had separated from my mother and migrated with my two
older sisters to California. I finished fifth grade until I migrated with my
mother and brothers to Santa Rosa California with the help of my oldest sister who
helped me enroll in sixth grade when I was ten years old. I did not speak a
single word of English when I arrived to this country, thus the process to
socialize and adapt myself along with my family was burdensome.

            During my arrival to middle school,
I began receiving more academic, psychological and social attention through
counseling and after school programs my school offered to ESL students. It was
then that I was told I had the opportunity to attend college, never had I once
thought of anybody telling me this, given that I would have started working in
construction if I had stayed in Mexico to assist my single mother. After having
been explained the nature of the process to attend college, I was assisted in
impressive ways to have gotten to high school, master the English language by my
freshman year and begin taking the honors and AP courses during my sophomore
year.

            Aside from accepting the tremendous

academic challenges considering my limitations and disadvantages from my past,
I developed self-confidence and leadership by involving myself with my school
in various clubs and organizations until I found some that truly spoke to me as
a student and an individual. Some of these groups included the “Model United
Nations” at U.C. Berkeley, and the “Project Teens R U Educated?,” wich is a
non-profit organization formed by students who have an interest in providing
information to other middle school students, high school students and other community
members about the prevention of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs.

            From this instant I developed an
interest in psychology to the point of declaring it my major when I was a
freshman at Sonoma State University. My perspectives were broadened when I
transferred to the Santa Rosa Junior College where I double majored in
Psychology and Spanish, and they became even more expanded when I transferred
to UCLA in October 2013 where I am currently majoring in Sociology and minoring
in Public Affairs.

            Today I understand how intensely
interested I am in assisting different minority groups from various cultures
and ethnicities to interact with each other through social services they might
be in need of. I desire to facilitate the social interaction of such
communities by maintaining a constant communication between the educational,
health, political, and other social systems in different countries and connect
them together with as many different societies as possible. I currently call
this occupation an “International Social Worker/Counselor/Activist” but it is
this vague precisely because I am still in search of contributions to this
objective once I continue taking advantage of the resources and services UCLA
offers me.

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