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Lizbeth J Hernandez

Professor Raymond

UWRT 1103

31 July 2020

Focuses and Detours

The topic of ancestry is such a huge branch there are always never-ending details that

sometimes lead you to other research topics and cause you to take a detour. The thing is that it

wasn’t just my personal research that caused me to look into other directions to find answers but

it was also the inspiration of my classmates and their findings. I liked to see my classmates’

stories and their findings and trying to do some research of my own about their topics because I

find history in America so interesting and since my family is from Mexico I don’t have direct

connections to American ancestry. A detour that I took for my project was when my aunt was

telling me about where she lives. I have never been to Mexico but I know that my mom has

siblings that decided to stay in Mexico but were dispersed to different states within Mexico.

Specifically, my aunt was telling me about Veracruz, Mexico and I decided to look into it to see

how the city looked and it was honestly beautiful. This small bit of information encouraged me

to look into the other states that my aunts and uncles are dispersed in and where they live.

Looking at these photos gave me a sense of what their “home” consisted of and gave me an

insight into what their perspective of the United States was as well. Although my Genealogy

Project has nothing to do with where they live since I am focusing more on where my

grandparents live I think that detour was very informative and made me look into my

grandparents’ life as well. I know for sure that my grandparents miss their home and, sadly, they
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can’t ever return. They left their home thinking they would return and then the universe took a

turn of events. This detour was a big one because I was researching these places when I had no

idea what my inquiry question would be on. The vignette “Living Like an Italian” also

encouraged me to discover what my family considered home in Mexico and what they consider

home here in the United States.

One area of research that shocked me was finding out the reality of things in general. I

feel like it is so easy to say how things occurred but it never gives the same effect and

importance that would be given if details were expressed. I realized that without this class I

would probably just tell my kids that my parents migrated to the United States as simple as that.

Now I know that there is so much more to it and how greatly this is going to impact future

generations. I wasn’t surprised to hear all of those things I was more in shock of how long it took

for my parents to talk to me about and give me the details. Out of the five different categories of

Student Learning Outcomes, the one that came easiest to accomplish personally was rhetorical

knowledge. This was something that I picked up fast because I understood and I found purposes

to my writing. I found new ways to approach things and took the time to understand what the

writing prompts were asking for and considered the audiences. I have learned and grown a lot

with these categories but some of them took more time than others but I am glad I grew as a

writer to use these concepts.