Free Essay Sample «Mexican Americans»

The Mexican Americans comprises of many groups of people including the US citizens and the immigrants who have come from Mexican. Though formerly the Mexican American population lived in the rural areas where they practiced agriculture, today most of them are living in the urban areas.

There are several things that I learnt from the study of the ethnographic study about the group Mexican Americans in Houston, Texas. One of the demographic questions I asked in the interviews I conducted in the study was region. Most of the American Mexicans in Texas are Christians and they attend catholic churches, Magana L. (2005). They have kept their faith and they usually obey the church doctrines through receiving sacraments and conducting their marriages in the church. More so, they ensure that their children are baptized and they are taught about the Christian religion. To them Mexican Americans, the church is holy place for worship. There are other Mexican Americans who are Christians in faith but they attend protestant churches. There are many protestant churches in Texas for the protestant Christians, Leon A. (2001).

In Texas, Mexican Americans attend schools where they get educated. Children have the right to attend public schools in Texas, Leon A. (2001). There are private religious schools and also colleges which are attended by those who are financially able. There are some local institutions that have been established by some select communities which have school curriculums designed in such a way that it can safeguard the values and traditions of Mexico. In Mexico, children normally attend the schools of Mexico but they mostly do not proceed with their learning from grade six, Magana L. (2005). Children from poor families face problems in getting education in places where there is no public schools around. The people living in the urban areas get better education because they have access to good private schools.

Agriculture is the main employment opportunity in Texas. Many of the Mexican Americans are farmers and they have offered jobs to many other people as farm laborers, Valdivieso R. (1990). There are still other Mexican Americans who work in the cities as entrepreneurs. In these cities, there are those who do menial jobs by working in the few industries in the towns. The people who are not specialized in any field work as shop helpers and or maids. The skilled professional workers perform jobs like secretariat, management, sales making and accounting. According to most of the jobs done by the Mexican Americans, their incomes are relatively low. Only a few people have good incomes especially those who have better employments like management and clerical jobs. The menial jobs done by the people have made them poor and having poor living standards.

Age determined many things among the Mexican Americans in Texas. The age of someone in school does no go beyond ten years of age, Valdivieso R. (1990). The Mexican Americans feel that a community is made up of people living together and who share a common history.

Interviews are a good method of sourcing data for ethnographic studies. One of its advantages is that it allows one to get more information from people because one can elaborate the questions for the participants to understand and give more comprehensive answers. More so, in conducting the interviews, I was able to get more information from the clients than I had asked for. In the interviews, I only asked questions that the participants could answer better and in so do, I did not have any answered questions. There are limitations of using interviews as I learnt from the study. One of these limitations is that interviews are difficult to conduct especially if the participants are not in the same areas and one is required to move from place to place to reach them. More so, the information received may be in the interviewees’ local language and one may get problems in translating the data. There is also a problem in analyzing and compiling the data received from the interviews.

There are other methods of collecting data that could have been used to provide better data. Observation is one of the data collection methods that the study could have employed to get primary data from the Mexican Americans in Texas. Using observation method could have provided more data that would be easy to analyze and compile.