The Myth about Mexicans
By David Pinzon
ENG 1300
For many years, the North Americans have classified the Mexican minority group in a different way. They have stereotyped them as being gang members, playing the role of macho men, as drug smugglers, as drug addicts, and as uneducated people. They never see the other side of the story or the reality that divides the community. They only base their expectations in what they see in the streets and not the family.
The Americans say that many Mexicans are gang members. Well, I can’t deny that. Some of the young Mexicans are either related or in gangs, but not all of them. The fact that some of them are in gangs doesn’t mean that all of them are the same way. This myth had cost a lot of discrimination against honorable Mexicans who go to ask for jobs and the owners are afraid to give them the job because of what the media says about them. They tell them that they don’t want to have anything to do with gang members or those who relate to them.
The media makes canard advertisements about Mexicans and the people believe them. The media has created a different image of the Mexicans. Most of the Mexicans are workaholics. They work double shifts and they dedicate themselves to their families. They work so that their children have a better future that those that they are living now. They make their children work hard in school and to behave well everywhere. Others work to send money back to their homeland; Mexico. They are peaceful people, they are not perfect, but they are as every other culture; not perfect.
Now, I believe every country has its own drug problems, drug dealers, and consumers. Let’s not blame it to the Mexicans only. Just because the Mexicans have a border with this country it doesn’t mean that if the Mexican stop smuggle ring drug the other countries will also stop. I believe that the drug problem has to do with the inner county society and its education about them.
The issue about being a macho man does apply to the Mexicans; I can say that all of them are equal. The macho man thing is staying behind with the years and the more open-minded the man is becoming; these situations are less seen within male Mexicans. I consider myself as an open-minded person and not a macho that everybody thinks a Mexican is. I don’t consider myself a macho of anything like that; I understand more about people than everybody else thinks I do. I believe that the macho thing was made by the media to give a wrong image about men, especially Mexicans. The movies made the complementary punch to declare a Mexican macho in how they make them act in the movies.
Movies have created an image of the Mexicans as a not educated person because they always make Mexicans the waitress, the gardener, the gang member, or the housekeeper and not the lawyer, or the cop. These all-false images are kept by viewers and think that all people are the same and that they judge the people by what the media says about that ethnic group.
Finally, I would like to say that most of these stereotypes are false and that the Mexicans are not a perfect culture and that every culture has ethnic problems. That many people judge other cultures for what they hear or see on the news and only see the bad part of the culture, not the good part. I will leave the judgment to you and hope that you judge anybody for what they are and not for what you have heard about them.