Winnie Harlow Quotes

My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.

Well, I have a Norwegian father who emigrated to America in the 1950s, and he still speaks with varying degrees of an accent. Over my lifetime my ear has been well-tuned to that accent. Any first generation kid has that wonderful gift from their parents.

I think my parents were immigrants, you know, so I guess I would be first generation. Growing up in California.

When I think of my work, I'm aware that I'm American and African at all points and times. And without a doubt, my experience and understanding of America was shaped by having immigrant parents.

… the tendency, reprehensible and paradoxical as it might be, has been for the national clusters of immigrants, as they became more and more firmly established and more and more prosperous, to cultivate more and more assiduously the literatures and cultural traditions of their homelands. Assimilation, in other words, instead of washing out the memories of Europe, made them more and more intensely real. Just as these clusters became more and more objectively American, did they become more and more German or Scandinavian or Bohemian or Polish.

I'm Cuban. My parents are immigrants.

Both of my parents were first-generation Americans, the children of Jews who left Eastern Europe around the turn of the century.

My mother is a German who was brought up in the U.K. So, there is so much cross-cultural exposure I had as a child. But Mumbai is my city.

My grandfather on my dad's side was the first in our family to settle in the U.K. He came from Pakistan on his own in the '60s and worked in a cotton mill in Bolton, earning enough to bring over the rest of his family. My dad, Shah, was only about eight when he came to this country. Like most immigrants, he has a fierce work ethic.

I was born in Canada, but both my parents are Syrian - they moved to Canada in the '70s, and I was born in a 100-percent-Arab house.

I grow up in the States, in Miami, but I was born in Guatemala, and my father's Cuban, and in 'Body of Lies,' I played an Iraqi.

I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.

I loved 'Ghana Must Go' by Taiye Selasi. It's about a first-generation African family living in America that has to return home to Nigeria when their estranged father passes away.

I want people to experience what it's like being from Haiti, coming to America, being Wyclef - multicultural, multilingual.

To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author. He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home.

I'm Korean-American. Not Colombian. My parents are first-generation, and I'm like... in-between, because I moved over here when I was four or five.

I couldn't be more American if I tried. I was born in Ethiopia, but I was raised and educated as an American.

I'm first generation in the country - my family's Mexican.

My father is 100% Japanese and came to the United States when he was only 18 years old. My grandmother still resides in Japan, which has allowed me to travel to the roots of my ancestors with my father.

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

I have a variety of readers from across the diasporic community, not just from South Asia. I like to write large stories that include all of us - about common and cohesive experiences which bring together many immigrants, their culture shocks, transformations, concepts of home and self in a new land.

My mom came to the U.S. very young, and then she married very young. But she was never American. She was always Scottish and would make sure that I knew that I was, too.

I was born in the U.S., my wife was born in Mexico and emigrated here when she was in college, and my daughters were born in New York City. That makes them passport-carrying, natural-born, eligible-to-run-for-president Americans. But they're also Mexicans and they like that just fine.

My father had to flee from what is today Pakistan when he was a child, and he became a manager at IBM, and any item of consumption he would acquire was a direct measurement of his success in life. But that same equation wasn't going to work for me - I was quite clear about that in my early teens.

I'm such an odd mix of things. My grandfather was Indian: I've got more family living in India than I do in the U.K. My old man was East London. I was brought up in Yorkshire. My great-grandfather was Irish.