Mad hatters

I feel very strong about Salas's paper on the barriers, strategies and support systems that second-generation immigrants utilize to succeed in elite college campuses. I feel like I relate to all the factors he mentioned that maid aid in the personal, academic and professional success of second-generation immigrants. Although I became an American Ciziten in 2006, I still identify as a second generation immigrant simply because of the barriers I have inside and outside the classroom. Salas talked about how Immigrant children have parents who are less able to help them with their schoolwork due to language and cultural barriers. I grew up struggling to do homework because I was an English second language student.

As a sociology major and someone whose parents currently live in Tucson Arizona,  I was interested in seeing how the different forms of capital create a “Community Cultural Wealth” for Chicana students in the Hubert article. The value we place on different types of capital give us a window into the hierarchies in American society.  Tracing the capital through various stories of women helps to illuminate the presence of different capital in different people. The “racist nativist framing” also was particularly interesting as I have seen this idea of “immigrants as criminals” often on the news in Arizona. Few whites are shown as drug dealers and murders in Tucson (less than 90 miles from Mexico) where road checkpoints profile every driver and stop those who look “mexican”.

The Implications of Labeling and Stereotypes on Individual and Collective Identity: Curriculum for High School, Two weeks and Six, One hour Classes

This curriculum aims to help students think critically about the implications of labeling and stereotypes. Goals include creating a heightened sense of awareness of labels and stereotypes. Labeling in this curriculum refers to the ways in which we distinguish differences by putting a name on that “thing” or person. These labels carry deep meaning and are embedded in social context, as well as racial, gender and class hierarchies. For example, white are rich and powerful, people of color are not.

How do we in society move beyond labels? Student, victim, survivor, criminal–all designations carry a certain connotation invoke a certain image of the person described, but those assumptions seldom contain the truth. What is more, so many of thease labels come from a place of damage. Both in and out of prison the assigned identities of "prisoner" or "convict" or "ex-con" or "inmate" carry a lot of weight as far as first impressions and asumptions of who a person is, and Pinkert found that same mentality to be true of Holocaust survivors. That very term "survivor" even starts at a place of damage, emphasizing that a person has "survived" and come through some sort of orderal.

"Many of the course texts reflected what Forman (2002) calls the "extreme local," or hip-hop's narrative preoccupation with specific cities, area codes, neighborhoods, housing projects, and so forth within its texts. Throughout the semester, students consitently expressed a preference for texts that emphazied geographic secificty and local knowledge..."