What Makes Me American


A group of students at Stephens Middle School wrote essays for a Sertoma Club competition about what it's like to live in America. Their English teacher, Carla Watson, shared the essays with Congressman Stephen Horn who had them published in the Congressional Record. Here's what Allegra Ban wrote:

I am a young woman of Croatian descent. My father was born in Russia, his father in Yugoslavia. I will never know what it is like to be native to these places, yet from family stories I have heard, I can imagine.

My grandfather, Papa as we call him, came to America is search of the "promise" land. To him America was the place he could be what he wished, not what his father was, and his father's father. An Ironworker.

I think the true moment of freedom came in the new country, when my grandfather watched his oldest son, my father, graduate from University High.

Then Berkeley.

Then M.I.T.

My grandfather sits silently some nights, staring out over the calm of what he calls his own. Looking closely, you can still see Russia in his eyes. From this, I know how lucky I am to live and be of this country. By leaving Russia, my papa gave my father the chance to be something other than an Ironworker. He gave me more opportunities than I can imagine. For this I am thankful. This is what makes me American.

[Note: The Ironworks shop where Howard Ban was apprenticed was destroyed in early 1990 by Serbian revolutionaries.]

Go back to Allegra's diary