Symbolic Culture Video

A. Components of symbolic culture (pg. 41) defines how cultures as whole communicates basically. This involves hand gestures, language, and other forms of communication. A symbol is also used to attach meaning. In the video these people mainly attached meaning to each other. They looked up to the father figure as support, the man that’s supposed to bring in the most money and support the family financially. The mother figure is also the support, but she is in the home nurturing the family. We also see a lot of pictures of Jesus Christ, Mary, and we see the rosemary’s. This can also be considered components of symbolic culture because they use these images and objects to communicate their beliefs. Another symbol that the migrants put a lot of …show more content…
Components of cultural universals (pg. 54) define how some aspects of culture are found everywhere. Like in the video family’s stay close to each other just like here as Americans. The parents have to support and nurture their children, send them to school. As the children get older they have to start working too, to help support the family as a whole. Even after childhood people tend to stay close to their family’s to help support them and resolve any issues that may arrive. One huge cultural universal I noticed in the video was that the man of the house supports the family financially. He is the one that is always out working. He is the one that is doing the most labor around the house, and doing the most labor for money. Some of these families have it so bad that they are all out in the field working, including children. They have to give up their child’s education just to survive. The mothers would be out in the field working, alongside the men. Even the daughters would be working alongside their …show more content…
Socialization through the life course (pg. 270) involves the stages of life from birth to death. While here in America most stages involve school, job, marriage, children. But to these migrants, once they get here, there seems to be no more stages. They have to struggle for work, then work for less than minimum wage and still not have enough to make ends meet. The children in the migrant families sometimes have to drop out of school to work and help support the family. This gives these migrants no hope. They see how their parents struggle while they are growing up, and eventually it settles in that this is their life too. They are going to follow in their parent’s footsteps and there is nothing they can do about it. If they ever saw any hope growing up they will forget about it when they are dropping out of school to help support the family. We as Americans see how miserable these migrants lives are, and we still turn our heads and ignore their