The excerpt taken from Barrio Boy is wrapped around the idea of adapting and accepting change, while being proud of what you’ve had before the adaptation. In the opening paragraphs, we are greeted with writings about a new, nervous Mexican-American student named Ernesto Galarza. Over the course of the text, Galarza develops the central idea of being proud of your heritage, with phrases such as, “... making us into Americans did not mean scrubbing away what made us originally foreign,” and, “It was easy for me to feel that becoming a proud American… did not mean feeling ashamed of being a Mexican.” Through several snippets of the excerpt like, “... never let us forget why we were at Lincoln: for those who were alien, to become good Americans;