In this exercise you will compose an essay (600 words) based on your family’s history of migration, starting from the ancestral origin of our species in Africa in a process described by de Blij and Muller (2010: 282) as the first round of globalization: Africanization. Your essay must also describe the background of both of your parents’ families. Regardless of your ethnic background or family origin, all people living in the Americas (North, Middle, and/or South America) are descendants of migrants or are recent migrants. Even the ancestors of Native American populations came to the Americas crossing the Behring Land bridge (today’s Behring Strait) more than 14,000 years-before-present. It is interesting to note that in Canada, these groups are known as “First Nations.”
In this essay you must include references of your family’s [quintero last name from Colombia] migration to the United States or to South Florida starting in our ancestral homeland (Africa), and the push or pull factors that may have influenced or contributed to their/your migration. You may describe your family’s originating country and culture, and how living in the United States has influenced or changed various tenets within that culture.
You must also demonstrate knowledge of this topic by using key definitions related to the topic of this assignment: migration, push and pull factors, globalization, etc., and included in our course textbook related to the topic of migration, and others presented in class (i.e., Africanization). Your work must also include at-least one additional reference (textbook or a popular news forum – i.e., The New York Times) that relates to your family’s history of migration. You must include this reference in a separate page using only one of the following titles: Bibliography, Reference, or Works Cited; making a full citation of this/these source/s. Note that students are not allowed to use Wikipedia in any written assignment.
Any geographically-based essay must answer three broad questions: Where? Why? (and how?), and, So what? (or, in other words, why is this important?). For instance, you can answer the following questions:
Where did your father’s family (or his last name) originate? Where did your mother’s family (or her last name) originate?
Why did your father’s/mother’s family migrate from their homeland? [push – pull factors?]
In answering to the “So what?” question you must use the information you have included in the first two sections (Where? and Why?); this is an overview of your family background. If you don’t know much about your family background, you can include references to your ethnicity, and their path to migration to this country we know today as U.S.A. You can also make reference to the origin of the last names of your parents.
Since this essay is based on the topic of migration and our textbook puts special emphasis on this theme in two chapters (# 3 and # 6), start your essay by introducing this topic and its key definitions (i.e., what is Africanization, migration, push and pull factors? how is this phenomenon connected to globalization?, etc.). In any case, it is very important that your essay mentions all aspects related to the “Africanization of the world”, as part of what De Blij and Muller call, “…the first great wave of globalization.” (2010: 282), and other aspects related to the major waves of human migration in the process of world colonization mentioned here.