Social Class & Cultural Diversity

What I want to talk about today is the different family structures we have here in America. Our family structure has so much to do with our culture and the traditions of our family. We decided that for our class, culture is defined as a shared attitude with common values, goals, and practices. In each of our families we have a culture that is accepted among us. Sometimes we have things that disrupt that culture like when a sibling gets married and they try to bring in this outsider that has their own culture. Within our families we have these cultures that could also be known as traditions. When I hear the words traditions I immediately think of good and happy traditions in my family but what we brought up in class is that sometimes those traditions aren’t always good and happy and sometimes those things can actually be really negative cultural things we are doing that we don’t quite know how to break the chain. This was super interesting to me. Like maybe in your culture it is a normal thing to get pregnant in highschool but that can be a super negative tradition that affects generations of your family. Another thing we talked about was the Social Economic Class. Things within this social economic class are things like Material possessions, Clothing, Education (Formal or non formal), Size/Location of your home, Mannerism/Speech, Activities, and how much money you make. All of these things make up this thing called the social economic class. I’m sure you knew where you fit on this scale while you were in high school or middle school where kids make it super hard to ignore. What is interesting about this scale to me is the different ways this scale gives you a leg up in the world. If your parents have money then you don’t need to worry about how you are paying for college and if you have grown up with a different mannerism or speech then when you walk into a job interview you already are a step above the other candidates because you are well spoken for yourself. This was interesting because people always say lifes not fair but really life isn’t fair and it's not fair is so many more ways than we can begin to imagine.

On Thursday in class we mainly talked about something that doesn’t affect me personally but I know a lot of people who it does affect. We talked about how hard life is for families that cross the border and come to America. We mainly talked about the struggles of coming here illegally but we also touched on the struggle that comes with coming here legally as well. When families are planning to come here illegally normally they send that Dad over first with that hope that the rest of the family will be joining them in 6 months but on average it’s 3-5 years later. At this point the mother has been the one dispinling and raising those kids so when their Dad is back in the picture the children don’t have a relationship or respect for him anymore. Also when they come over they don’t have a social security number so they are looking at jobs that people will pay them under the table which is normally really tough manual labor jobs. Even if they were an account back in Mexico it doesn’t matter because there is no way anyone would hire them. With their very poor wages they almost always have to be living in a very small no cost home with other families that are in the same situation. When you think about all of this it makes me wonder if coming here to America was really the right choice or if they should have stayed back home with their family and possessions. My teacher said though that most of the parents know that this is going to be really hard and most of the time the parents never see the benefit in their own lifetime but when they do see the benefit is when their kids have kids and they start climbing up the social ladder. The whole situation is really sad and I wish our government could create some better policies for these people so they didn’t have to live the way they do.