Sociological Perspectives Of Crop Picker: Understanding Human Behavior

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a. Sociological perspective/pg. 3: Understanding human behavior by placing it within its broader social context. The sociological perspective is a perspective on human behavior as well as its connection to society. This perspective connects the behavior of individual people and structures of society as in how they live. At the beginning of this film, we are presented with statistics like “fourteen hour days, seven days a week” and “400,000 children pick the food we eat.” These statistics are given to us because they want us to compare the way we live to the way they live. By stating hard hitting facts at the beginning, we can automatically predict that our lives are much different than crop pickers. They also show sociological perspective …show more content…

Reoccurring problems in a migrant’s life may be jobs, income, education, residence, race, and consumption. By seeing this pattern of social issues in their time, they can predict how many jobs they need to put food onto the table, where they need to migrate to get work, what days a week they can attend school instead of crop picking, where they can find a place to stay, and if they are welcome into the places they stay. Victor Huapilla makes these generalizations as a sixteen year old crop picker. He helps his siblings onto the bus hoping they will get a good education, and stays behind to pick crops for the family. He knows that his role in his family isn’t to further his education, but to put food onto the table for the others. By being paid one dollar per bucket he picks, he can also make the generalization of how many buckets he needs for the day. Crop pickers have no guarantee of receiving minimum wage, or even money at the end of the day due to weather or illness. Zulema Lopez made the generalization that she was needed more as a crop picker than a student when her mother made her move in with her grandmother and father. Without even giving a chance to see her dad, she realized that wasn’t the environment for her. She moved back with her mother to proceed picking crops because that’s what she feels she has to do. She was handed the dream of many migrant children, and she gave it back. She …show more content…

Each pattern reflects some condition of society. “Patterns that hold true year after year indicate that as thousands and even millions of people make their individual decisions, they are responding to conditions in THEIR society.” (pg.14) Some social facts in this film includes all of the family’s nutrition. The health and wellbeing of the crop pickers are crucial because of hard physical labor. It is a fact that because many children’s parents don’t eat well, the children won’t eat well either. Another social fact is sanitation. While picking crops, many children and adults didn’t wear shoes. This opens pesticides to their skin, clearly damaging it. Sanitation also plays the role when one mother put her child in a crate of cucumbers to play with while only wearing a diaper. This sanitation hazard could continue, due to parents thinking it is okay. Migrant’s jobs are to pick the crops, not make sure they are clean for us to eat. This can tie into our home life of washing vegetables. If we see our families wash everything before we eat it, we will do the same through the years. If this is not the case, it will affect our decisions in making the right choice. Social facts also are demonstrated through parenthood. Majority of the time, the mother takes care of the children, cleaning, and the cooking. In the migrant’s society, we can see that is not the case. With many babies in the family, we

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