My thoughts

Reminisce

The thoughts that I have elaborated on in this class have made me form into a very different individual than when I first entered. I have been opened up to a new frame of mind and I have learned to appreciate the voices that no one tends to listen too, the voices of Latina’s and Chicana Lesbians. The thought of reading this stuff in class was odd to me at first because it is not a method usually chosen by a professor. I learned through this class the Chicana interpretation of Chingar and of the male oriented society we live in today. The struggles that a women that made it to the United States trying to get the rest of her family to the United States and how they are overlooked and unheard. These struggles that the Chicana goes through are often never discussed and we blame society and the image portrayed towards women and worse the image of lesbians. Many things that I have never chose to pay attention to or that I have not analyzed have occurred in my life and more importantly my mothers, sisters, aunts, and grandmas lives. The struggles that I live with everyday being half white and half Mexican is no where near the struggles that these women go through. I have lots of respect for these women and for what they have to endure throughout their lifetimes. An example could be taken from the movie Mi Familia, where the mother traveled all the way back through hell and high water after being deported to reunite her family and be with her husband.
I think that the open to input way of learning that happened in this class though quiet at times benefits all because it gives a student perspective on things and helps the professor decide what way to swing the conversation. I also liked how the material always gave us something to talk about, it was controversial at times but it always made you think. I liked being able to have the freedom to write what was affecting my life at that time on my responses and just incorporate some of those issues talked about in class with my experiences in everyday life. I like having that freedom of not always having to follow the guidelines that were set, especially if it is something that you feel passionate about than you are given the freedom to discuss those issues you feel so strongly about that really affect your life. I know in my papers I wrote about what was on my mind at the time, though I was not always vocal in class, I found myself talking about a lot of Latino and Chicana issues that were brought up in class with my friends and family. That connection is great because it is good to see what you are learning or discussing in class is used in real life conversations. In away I feel that the things that are learned and carried out in that manner are the things that you remember its not memorizing and taking a test and being done with it and forget it, (banking method) it is something that struck a chord in your brain to where you analyzed and discussed it and I think because of that it will be better remembered and not forgotten.
The class has also opened a can of worms within myself on how uncomfortable I am with America today. A country that doesn’t care what minorities have done for it to flourish, all the free labor that it had through slavery and the cheap labor they get now by exploiting poorer economies throughout the world or what we call third world labor. How can America get away with exploiting workers by accepting them into America but when they don’t need the help anymore just treat them like criminals or illegal aliens so they can justify to send them back. Gerald Lopez states his hypothesis of the push-pull theory as: “Where there is substantial economic disparity between two adjoining countries and the potential destination country promotes de jure or de facto, access to its substantially superior minimal wage, that promotion encourages migrants to reasonably rely on the continuing possibility of migration, employment, and residence, until a competitive economic alternative is made available in the source country” (Lopez 93). However America will do its best to ensure Mexico will not get to that point. It angers me how America is nothing but a racist thief that has robbed minorities for over two hundred years and yet imprisons five times more minorities than they do majority (white people).The racist laws we have learned about like 187 are laws that are being put in by whites in California, is it because they fear that they are the minority so it makes them feel inferior so racism and re-issuing stereotypes helps them to feel superior again. Delgado talks about stuff like this in The American Apocalypse when he states: “The U.S. will have a system of apartheid, in effect, with whites wielding power over a large but increasingly powerless black and brown population of laborers and domestics” (Delgado 293). This is evident in California already in many circumstances. All this but it has to be better than it was in the 60’s and 70’s because we feel no need for a movement, today we have conceited to hegemony and are just pawns in a white system that has outwitted us thus far, but we are becoming better educated as minorities and I just hope that the minority intellectuals of today and the future can take counter-hegemonic stories and change hegemony in this country for the betterment of all minorities. This class has continued to open my eyes and my mind to many new ways of looking at the Latino struggle and they are issues that I will consider and reconsider from here on throughout my life.