Culture, Time and Opportunity Made Reyna Grande a Success

What factors can contribute to a person’s success? When answering this question, many people may argue that it should be innate talent that the ordinary people don’t have. However, that is not true because not all the talented people were successful in history. Some of them even became the failures. In contrast, Malcolm Gladwell argues in his work Outliers: The Story of Success that anyone succeeded was often given great opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to work hard for their achievements. In this essay, his point of view will be analyzed by the story of Reyna Grande, who is a successful Mexican woman writer and obtains many awards for her books. It will be examined how culture, time and opportunity made Reyna Grande a Success.

Gladwell explains his argument through an experiment to show the importance of understanding the cultural roots of a person or a group as well as the power of that cultural legacies to understand the current situation of a person, e.g. success or failure. He believes “……if you want to understand what happened in those small towns in Kentucky in the nineteenth century, you have to go back into the past……you have to go back two or three or four hundred years, to a country on the other side of the ocean, and look closely at what exactly the people in a very specific geographic area of that country did for a living.” (Gladwell, 184) Though Reyna Grande lives in America now, she was born in Mexico. She came to America as illegal child immigrant when she was nine years old. Her parents came to America a few years earlier than her and her siblings. Before she went to America, she already started to learn to create stories by listening to her grandma’s radio. (Stewart) According to her memoir The Distance between Us, during the absence of her parents, she lived with her grandma, a tough old woman, who lived through the Mexican Revolution and paid little attention to her and her siblings. However, her aunt Tia Emperatriz sometimes would look after her and her siblings when her grandpa didn’t care about them. It was lucky for her. Her mother worked in a garment factory for all day to earn money in the first two years in America. Her father ever harvested crops and did maintenance work in America. When her parents got split, she still had a kind uncle, Tío Crece and a good grandma, Abuelita Chinta. Her father was finally able to have a house of their own through several years’ hard working and insisted his children should receive the education. He also offered the opportunity to America for Reyna Grande. After they successfully arrived in America, her father ever frightened them that “Ｉbrought you to this country to get an education and to take advantage of all the opportunities this country has to offer. The minute you walk through the door with anything less than As, I’m sending you straight back to my mother’s house.” (Grande, 150) It was also lucky for Reyna Grande to have a stepmother speaking both English and Spanish, who was also an American citizen with a proper education that enabled her to live in an American way. Moreover, her father had a strong desire for learning to improve their life further, which also set an outstanding example for his children. Reyna Grande respected her father, for he always had the broad vision for future. Reyna Grande grew up in such an environment that integrates both American culture and Mexican culture that she owned an advantage over her peers.

Gladwell concludes on many examples in various industries that “achievement is talent plus preparation” (Gladwell, 52). He believes those who work much harder than others in their fields and spend nearly ten thousand hours practicing are prone to be successful or become experts through analyzing some studies in his book. Reyna Grande developed her interest in stories at a very early age that she liked listening to her grandma’s radio and learned to make her own stories since then. When she started school in America, she also indulged herself in a lot of reading as before and gradually turned fascinated in various stories based on her memoir The Distance between Us. It was also because Reyna Grande read too much she got her first pair of eyeglasses at a very young age. She even created her own short-story to attend the writing contest in Burbank. “I turned in my short story, and, for the following two weeks, I was anxious about the results. By then I was beginning to fall in love with writing. In my writing, you couldn’t hear my accent, which is why playing the sax, writing, and drawing were my favorite ways of expressing myself.” (Grande, 215) She won the first place for her short-story in that contest, but she continued to write and read until she earned herself a great reputation for her works. It is evident that the time she spent on reading and writing already exceeded ten thousand hours before her success since she used most of her time in reading and writing. Without the foundation built in her early years, she was impossible to be so skillful in her later works. Before she was somebody in the writing field, she just kept practicing until one day many honors came to her.

Gladwell also emphasizes the significance of opportunities on one’s success. By analyzing many great people in history, he found they were born at a right time and were given the right opportunities to achieve what they wanted. Similarly, Reyna Grande, as a famous writer, was also the person who was born at a good time and was offered proper opportunities on her road to success. Born in Mexico and stayed there until nine years old, she could be taken to America by her father for more opportunities under the permission of her mother while her little sister Betty did not have such a possibility when her mother denied the chance for Betty. Being a little familiar with Mexican culture and language, she started her school in America at a right age, which provided her the opportunity to have a cross-cultural experience and bilingualism. Before she obtained her green cards, she could be taken care of under the name of her stepmother’s child, who was in her similar age but not lived with her stepmother. The green cards were granted to them at a right year when her sister Mago was planning for her college and financial aid and Reyna Grande also became the legal resident in America to attend a new high school. Her mother also gained the legal residency under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 in 1993. When Reyna Grande was nineteen and in a mess of life, she encountered a good teacher Diana, who inspired her on writings and saved her from the family troubles. Diana introduced a new world to Reyna Grande. Then another opportunity came that it was a writing competition supported by the Townsend Press Scholarship Program. Being a winner, Reyna Grande earned one hundred dollars as the award. The relationship with Diana helped Reyna Grande move forward to the college education of UCSC and her later teaching career. In 2002, Reyna Grande managed to become a citizen of America.