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Giuseppina, based on the author's grandmother, grew up in Palermo, Sicily, before immigrating to America. She is proud of her Italian heritage and keeps traditions alive, such as making tomato sauce and playing the card game Scopa. In America, she faced challenges as an immigrant, including language barriers and prejudice, but found support in her community. Living in a diverse neighborhood allowed her to learn about other cultures and share her own experiences. However, she also felt a sense of loneliness due to the language barrier and sometimes longed for her homeland. Giuseppina, the name of my character, is modeled after my grandma. She was born in the late 1940s and was raised in a lovely city of Palermo, which is found in Sicily, in the southern tip of the infamously formed Bu in Italy. She is 100% Italian because her entire family carries Italian DNA. My great-grandma, her mother, had previously immigrated to America in the hopes of providing her family with better chances and a higher standard of living since they had previously lived in poverty in their native country. Even though she had grown up in Palermo, she lived in America for a while before returning to Italy. She grew up in Palermo for another 25 years before the whole family decided to move back to America. Although it was not their last departure, and they would find themselves back in Italy one last time before officially making America their home. When it comes to their attitude towards their heritage, they are very proud of where they came from and have no fear of showing it. When given the chance, my character is eager to talk about her upbringing and her struggles living in Palermo and the lessons she had learned from those experiences. Future family and friends are given the opportunity to live vicariously through her and her experience. Experience the pride she exudes while telling those stories because she feels that doing so will help to preserve the memory and stories of past family and friends. When it comes to family rituals, my character does her best to keep those traditions alive. One of her favorite traditions is that over the summer, they dedicate one weekend to making hundreds of jars of brushed tomato sauce to give out to family and friends so they can use them throughout the year as well. Another tradition that has been passed down through the years is that after dinner, everyone plays a famous card game in Italy called Scopa to preserve the heritage and sense of their motherland. The card game has been taught to younger generations. Finally, because religion and Catholicism is so prevalent in Italy, where my character is from, there is a parade held in honor of Jesus' birthday every year on Christmas Eve and at 12 in the morning, everyone is required to give a kiss on the infant Jesus' forehead. Living in America as an Italian immigrant has its ups and downs, as many of you can assume. It is not always easy living in a country where many people look at you as a foreigner and are constantly trying to tear you down for being different. In Giuseppina's case, she was blessed to have enough support and determination from her friends and family to not let the challenges turn her away from the opportunity to be successful in a country where everyone has the chance to prosper, unlike back in Sicily, where poverty is so prevalent. One instance that will always stick with her is when she first got to America, she had trouble learning and understanding English. Not only because no one in Sicily spoke it, but because she never got the chance to go very far in school. After her fifth grade year, her family believed that she was old enough to help out around the house, doing chores such as cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the animals on the farm. Because of this, many born and raised Americans looked down upon her, especially since everything was still very much male-dominated. They did not believe she was very smart, so no one ever gave her a fair chance in the work field, although this did not discourage her, since she knew she was going to make the best of her situation because not everyone got the same opportunity as her. Many people may think that because she was foreign, she did not experience many benefits of living in a diverse community, when in fact it created a lot of benefits. In the 60s, many immigrants all moved in the same neighborhoods as each other, which created a sense of community for everyone because although they did not know each other through family or friends, they all created a sense of family within the community because they all went through the same experiences and hardships that it took to make it to America. With this sense of community, they all helped each other thrive in the new country together. They helped each other learn the language, find jobs, all while keeping a sense of the old country with them. Although she did not directly live in a diverse neighborhood, the community around her was very much diverse. This allowed her and everyone else to share cultures and their history. They would create festivals that they celebrated each heritage, and everyone was invited to join. This was a big benefit about living amongst different people because they got to experience what life outside of Italy, the Italian culture, is like. Growing up in Palermo, everyone becomes family, whether they are related or not, which is one of the reasons why Giuseppina found herself being a part of such a tight-knit community. Everyone could relate to each other in one way or another because of the experiences they all faced when it came to living in a town where many people struggled financially and tried their best to make it work. When Giuseppina immigrated to America, she found herself surrounded by her friends who lived in Sicily as well. Her best friends, Enza and Maria, helped her feel like she had a part of home with her when she missed it the most. Enza and Maria were sisters who were around the same age as Giuseppina. Both being from Sicily, they spoke the same languages, ate the same meals, and even had the same traditions when it came to holidays or other events. Their father worked as a fisherman, and their mother stayed at home to help take care of the house by cooking, cleaning, and watching the children until they were old enough to work for themselves. With this, they also grew up with very little money, causing them to understand what it means to work hard, and with this, they had the same dreams as everyone else in the community who moved to America, where there are plenty of opportunities to succeed financially and break the cycle of living in poverty. That being said, in order for Giuseppina to break the cycle for her family, she had to participate in some sort of work in order to make money to live. She found a job at an airport, where she made friendships with all different types of ethnic groups. She had a close friend named Sam, who was from Mexico, and although they were similar in some aspects, their cultural backgrounds were two different things. Sam invited Giuseppina to a dinner with her family, where she learned about her and her family's background, and over time, she learned how to speak some Spanish. They exchanged recipes from their culture and other things, such as traditions. That being said, that was one of the benefits of living in such a diverse community. She got to experience what other cultures were like and how they grew up, while sharing her own memories. In Sicily, everyone lived a similar life, so there was a lack of diversity in the community. In America, that was her first time really meeting different cultural backgrounds and creating connections with them, rather than only hearing about it. But the benefits come with challenges, as well, of living in such a diverse community. Because not everyone speaks the same language fluently, there is a language barrier between many people, which leads to Giuseppina, at times, feeling a sense of loneliness, which creates a sense of desire to go back to her homeland, where she did not have to face those challenges.