1. Group B---emarsella26

What types of family expectations or traditions are your characters facing?

the main characters in'we are not from here' by J.T.Sanchez are kids ages of 17-13. piquenia being the oldest and the one who is expected to hold most of the family's traditions as she has given birth to a child after an assault. 

the women around he expect her to raise the child, and this is a huge part of what pushes her to flee her home. not only out of the lack of want to care for the child but also out of fear of the father who is a tyrant member of the local gang/cartel. 

How do those characters respond to these expectations? 

piquenia flees the responsibility and rightfully so. 

on her way out she helps her younger siblings greatly by bringing them with her and preventing them from getting to involved in the ongoing conflicts they've been having with the same gang as witnesses. 

In “American Street” by Ibi Zoboi, the main character is a young haitian illegal immigrant named Fabiola. Upon entering the U.S. , her mother and grandmother were both caught, with her grandma being deported and Fabiola last seeing her mother being detained. They were trying to get to Detroit to live with her Aunt Jo and her three daughters, Chantal, Pri, and Donna. Fabiola is hit by a massive culture shock in Detroit, and her imagined reality of the “American Dream” begins to break apart. She struggles to continue life in this new place without her mother for guidance, torn between a new place, new people, a boy she likes, and her cousins, she tries to persist in the streets of detroit.

What types of family expectation or traditions are your characters facing?

Fabiola comes into Detroit with old Haitian habits, like speaking Creole and praying. Her Aunt is immediately against these, determined to turn her into a typical Michigan kid. “ ‘Wi, Matant.’ ‘English!’ she yells, and I jump. ‘Yes, Aunt.’ “ (Zoboi 17) While Aunt Jo doesn’t know about Fabiola’s praying yet, she immediately jumps onto her attempts to speak her first language, Haitian Creole, insisting she use proper English from the start. Her family also insists on her schooling right after she arrives, going to school in a uniform and with other American children.

How does your character respond to these expectations?

Fabiola submits to these rules, eager to fit in and earn respect from her Aunt, her cousins, and her classmates. She speaks only English and dresses appropriately, letting her Haitian background show very rarely and only with select people.

In my book The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, two characters are introduced and their names are Ashoke and Ashima. Ashoke and Ashima are Indian immigrants that moved to America. Ashoke had been in a fatal train wreck. Because of this accident this, he made his desicison to move to the America. Ashima and Ashoke had a son when they moved to Massachusetts, and named him Gogol. In the beginning of the book when Ashima is going into labor and she needs her husband, when she calls out for him she doesn’t think of his name, “She has adopted his surname but refuses, for propriety’s sake, to utter his first. It’s not the type of thing Bengail wives do.”(Lahiri pg. 2) This quote shows how this it a tradition in her culture and how even though she was going into labor, its still so forced into her brain to not call her husbands name. Even though she doesn’t call his she still finds a way to get his attention.