Poppy Montgomery Quotes

My identity is not based on performance; it's based on something that's pre-determined by someone else, and I don't even understand what that is because I'm an African who came to America.

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

I became more interested in the idea of being an immigrant and particularly of being in a country you're not familiar with. And so I began reading migrants' stories. The fact that my father is Chinese - he emigrated from Malaysia when he was about 20 - may have had some bearing on my attraction to the subject.

Immigrants to the United States usually arrive with a willingness to fit into their new country and reshape their identities accordingly.

I think that's what makes many Swedes jealous of immigrant groups. You have a culture, an identity, a history, something that brings you together. And what do we have? We have Midsummer's Eve and such silly things.

I was twice-born. I'm Mexican by nature and Hungarian by nurture.

I didn't really grow up with any traditions. I grew up in a pretty liberal household in Southern California. I think that's part of my interest in thinking about heritage. I don't have a second language or cultural heritage in that way.

My parents immigrated to this country from Jamaica with no more than a fifth-grade education.

The idea of ignoring your past, only to confront it later in life, is a familiar experience whether you come here from Hungary or French Canada or Ireland.

America is not a melting pot. It is a sizzling cauldron.

Rather than be asked to abandon one's own heritage and to adapt to the mores of the new country, one was expected to possess a treasure of foreign skills and customs that would enrich the resources of American living.

I was born in Costa Rica and we moved to America where it was a whole new world for me.

Yeah, I think that's sort of the American way. And it's also the Polish way, it turns out.

America is remarkable, don't you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way.

I'm Russian Jewish. And I had to grow up really quickly.

Immigration was a huge force in changing my outlook. I moved to America 30 years ago. I had to reassess my beliefs, especially about women's roles.

Australia has an increasingly multicultural society.

I didn't grow up with my Kenyan family. I grew up in a small, conservative suburb of Chicago.

I always identified myself as non-Swedish. I was never discriminated against, because I looked Swedish and speak without an accent. But I had an outsider's perspective.

Anyone that has come to America past the age of eighteen will be able to understand when I say that you can never shake your accent.

I remember acting in a school play about the melting pot when I was very little. There was a great big pot onstage. On the other side of the pot was a little girl who had dark hair, and she and I were representing the Italians. And I thought: Is that what an Italian looked like?

Explain to me what Italian-American culture is. We've been here 100 years. Isn't Italian-American culture American culture? That's because we're so diverse, in terms of intermarriage.

Thus the races, though alike in their physical response to climate, may possibly be different in their mental response because they have approached America by different paths.

I knew I had to write about Canada. I just could not find in literature any examples of the immigrant experience that I've had.

I was born in America but all of my friends' parents, everybody's parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe. Many people in my neighborhood hardly bothered to learn English.