Cultural Differences: Similarities Between Mexican And African Americans

There are many ethnicities in the world, the two ethnicities that I chose to interview were a Mexican and an African. They were both females, mothers who were hesitant to cooperate for the survey/ questioning in the start, but were put to eased when it was made clear that the questioner was in all of the senses anonymous in the way that only myself will know who they were since pseudonyms are to be made to replace their true names. The Mexican is to be named Juana and the African is to be named Aisha. There are many similarities that can be seen in their parenting and culture, but there were also some clearly differences between the two. I will go through and start with the biographical information and the culture of Juana and the Aisha and

She is a 47 year old mother of 3 children whose main duty is the house, a housewife. Juana grew up herself in a low socioeconomic status household with her family that contained 10 children. She added that they might have been poor but there was not a day one of them went to sleep with an empty stomach. The highest level of education that was completed was high school; Juana went on to explained that after graduating high school her duty in her household was to help with house chores and also to work to provide and help maintain her family. When it comes to Juana’s culture, she stated that it is a collectivist culture in which everyone is family based; Nobody is seen to be thinking about themselves first rather than the good of their family. Especially since Juana’s home country is dominated by Mexicans, in fact Juan had added that back then, there was no other ethnicity that was seen until recently. To Juana, the Mexican culture is high in context; it is a culture in which people are raised to be able to “read between the lines.” There are many phrases that contained a double meaning and only if a person are raised in the Mexican culture can understand what exactly is being said, or what is being

A clear example of one of the levels, the Macrosystem can be seen in both of my interviews. The Macrosystem is a dominant belief and ideologies in which the individual beliefs. It can be seen how the parents culture and how freely people are allowed to freely express themselves affects the child directly as the parenting style is closely attached to that ideology. For example, Aisha’s respond to how freely people are encouraged to freely express their feelings, she responded with how they might be encouraged to be themselves, but are also looked at to contain a specific role. Women are to take up the role of staying at home and cook while men are to go out and provide for the household and are looked down on if they express themselves in any other way. Also, certain “not normal” feelings are discouraged, including being/identifying as a gay, lesbian, etc. From the answer of how Aisha’s culture carries itself it can be said that Aisha’s ideology would be that people are not to do as they say, but rather follow the norm. This ideology affects the child because Aisha’s parenting style is authoritarian, in which her children are to do as she say, without back talk and hesitation. The children are to assume their roles and not protest as the ideology states. In conclusion, families come from different cultures in which affects how