After many, many hours of photo, video, and audio editing, I have finally finished my final project.
Let me preface this by explaining myself before you watch the video.
Initially, my final project was supposed to be about something else because I quite literally took the instructions of our original project ideas and made an actual story. Once I saw the kind of final projects that were being posted by other people this week, it made me realize that my original idea didn’t have enough meaning to it. I wanted my project to be something really meaningful, something that I would be proud of.
So I scrapped my entire project halfway through the week and started a new one. A new, more meaningful one.
The video may seem short, but many, many hours and tears were put into this video. In fact, one could even say that this video took years to make. I’d like to think that this video has a lot of meaning into it. As much as I tried to fit in my experiences into this video, I could only partly encompass what it meant to grow up as a first-generation Hispanic immigrant in the United States. I grew up in Houston, Texas with Spanish as my first and only language, surrounded by an entire community that only spoke Spanish. Whenever my parents moved us into a white community in order for me to be able to get better education, the challenge of having to learn English hit me like a bus. It was like listening to static all day, every day. I couldn’t understand anything throughout all of kindergarten up until the end of elementary school. Even then, my English was still poor. It was extremely difficult to learn one language at school while having to practice an entirely different language at home, especially without any formal teaching. It took me an extremely long time to become properly fluent in English, I’d say that I truly didn’t learn up until late highschool. This video is meant to encompass the horribly confusing and stressful experience that it was to grow up living in two different worlds all at one time.
I put hours into this video so that even just one person could get a view of what it was like to grow up for me.
I hope you enjoy it!
… It sure took a while for me to do so.
