All throughout high school, I was pretty much drowned with, force-fed this information of, ‘Oh, you [students] are supposed to do better because you’re Hispanic, and everyone else won’t generalize you by saying Hispanics don’t succeed or whatever.’ So we were supposed to go beyond that. But even though [the school administration] kept telling us this all four years, ‘You have to graduate, you have to go to a four-year university’ and things like that, more than half of the school doesn’t graduate. So [students] know and they see how their parents are struggling, and they know that because of what the school tells us, education is the way out of hardship, but they still are way too lazy to do anything, and they settle for being like their parents.
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Many of the students at Jaylane’s high school possess a defiant attitude towards education because they see how American society has treated their parents, casting doubt on the ability of the educational system to guarantee them economic security. This more often than not leads them down the path to involvement in gangs and crime, a symptom which Trump’s anti-immigration program will only inflame without any hope of relief. Jaylane, fortunately, feels like her parents to not suffer economically, or at least not as drastically as the parents in other immigrant families—her father has a job fixing musical instruments while her mother runs the household. Furthermore, unlike many of Chicanos who maintain an antagonistic attitude towards what they perceive as economic success at the success of cultural heritage, Jaylane practices baile folklórico, or traditional Mexican dance, to maintain her relationship with her cultural identity while she studies to become an ophthalmologist, a career not often chosen by Latino American students. In conclusion, the contrast between Jaylane and the majority of the peers in her minority group exemplifies the idea that perceptions of poverty and one’s position on the socioeconomic ladder depend heavily on the exchange of attitudes between society and the individual. Agency depends on a positive self-perception, and self-perception depends on external circumstances which can be construed as positive by the
Many of the students at Jaylane’s high school possess a defiant attitude towards education because they see how American society has treated their parents, casting doubt on the ability of the educational system to guarantee them economic security. This more often than not leads them down the path to involvement in gangs and crime, a symptom which Trump’s anti-immigration program will only inflame without any hope of relief. Jaylane, fortunately, feels like her parents to not suffer economically, or at least not as drastically as the parents in other immigrant families—her father has a job fixing musical instruments while her mother runs the household. Furthermore, unlike many of Chicanos who maintain an antagonistic attitude towards what they perceive as economic success at the success of cultural heritage, Jaylane practices baile folklórico, or traditional Mexican dance, to maintain her relationship with her cultural identity while she studies to become an ophthalmologist, a career not often chosen by Latino American students. In conclusion, the contrast between Jaylane and the majority of the peers in her minority group exemplifies the idea that perceptions of poverty and one’s position on the socioeconomic ladder depend heavily on the exchange of attitudes between society and the individual. Agency depends on a positive self-perception, and self-perception depends on external circumstances which can be construed as positive by the