Unit 2 Paper
COM 320: Intercultural Communication
Letting go of your home culture is something very hard to do. People pride themselves every day with saying where there from and being honored to be from there. Therefore, in America people who have migrated here from their home countries tend to bring their ideas and practices from home and adjust them to living in American society. Many people have different reasons for leaving their home countries, some do it for the adventure, others because they haven’t seen anything else but their surroundings. However, the people that migrate to America usually do it for economic prosperity and seeking a better life for their future families. Now, with that being said, one of the reasons that immigrants in general tend to change their practices and ideas once they get to any country is because of the media and how the media portrays their ethnic group. For example, in America the media portrays most Mexican- Americans as working hard labor, low end jobs, pretty much doing America’s dirty work. Not all Mexicans that come to this country settle for shitty jobs, however, the ones that are looking to better their situation than how it is in Mexico will take anything that they can get and most migrants think like this. Because at the end of the day you have to put up or shut up in this country. Changes are also made because of the political and economic shifts that we have here in America and our social standards of living. For example, Americanization is huge in the world right now; about every country in the world has American influence therefore, if we are in an economic downfall or if our policies don’t think something is right many countries in the world kind just fall right behind to what we are doing as well. Now this leads me to the point out why immigrants when migrating to this country already have to settle for low end jobs and they come into the country with an idea of how they have to act when arriving, what not to do, what not to say, etc. Therefore, I feel as if immigrants in this country create their own identity in any country they migrate to and are able to be accepted in society due to their cultural norms being altered by media and early immigration to a country. This has allowed many different cultures in the world to adapt to many different cultures such Russian, Basque, and Irish and of course American cultures. As I said before one of the main reasons that people tend to change their practices and ideas is because of the media. Once you migrate to this country you are fresh and new, you are like a sponge ready to absorb all of the knowledge that this country has to offer you. Then you start watching TV and start seeing the norms of everyday Americans and letting these norms subconsciously sink into your brain making you act more and more like the Americans you see on TV. Then you’ll start looking at magazines observing the men and women on these magazines looking at how they dress and carry themselves making you think that you have to look a certain way leading you to start dressing different and thinking about your appearance when before, maybe you weren’t too worried about that. You see this in most women migrants than male migrants because women tend to worry more about their appearance than men do. Media has allowed for many of the practices that different ethnic groups had when coming to this country to change. These practices have changed because the immigrants felt the need to adjust to any cultures that immigrate to. For example, in the article “Watching Basque Television in Latin America” they analyze how the uses of satellite television bring something new and fresh to an old phenomenon which in this case is a continuation of the Basque identity. Therefore, showing how the use of television gives a person a sense of identity wherever you immigrate to any part of the world, “and at the same time it responds to a greater interest in some of