Chapter 1 Homework Questions

1. Reflecting on Sluzki’s model of migration and family life, in what stage do you think your parents, siblings, grandparents, and you are at the present time? Provide examples.

   • My family is in the transgenerational phenomena stage. My great-grandparents were fruit canners that traveled after harvesters up and down the I-5 in the 40s and 50s and they took their children with them. My great-grandparent’s siblings also were canners, so my grandpa has his cousins with him and they would all descend on their new schools together. One of these times, a little boy had asked my grandpa if he knew where the bathroom was in Spanish, so my grandpa responded back in Spanish. An administrator at the school overheard this and marched my grandpa back home to the converted chicken coop that my family lived in and yelled at my great-grandma for teaching him Spanish, and that they should only be speaking English if they were going to be living in the U.S. My great-grandma was really scared by this event, and from then on she was all about assimilation.

   • This caused problems for my tío and tía and my mom as children. Both my mom and my tío Dave were pretty much resigned to not living life as Mexican, but my mom was much more resistant to the idea of even being mistaken for being Mexican than my tío Dave was. Meanwhile, my tía Deb loved being Mexican, but because she didn’t know Spanish in school and my family didn’t practice any Mexican culture, she felt disconnected from her schoolmates who were Mexican.

   • For myself, I was always fascinated with us being Mexican. My mom told me once, and I was so happy I cried, and I was only about 5 years old. From then on, everything had to be Mexican, because I was Mexican, too. I remember that one year in school we had to do a cultural-heritage project, and they took us to the school library and had us pick out books based on which country we were from, what we were going to write about. I came home that day and was so excited to show my parents the big book of Mexico that I picked up. But when I pulled it out, my mom frowned and made me take by Mexico book back to the library and do a report on Wales instead.

2. In terms of the family life cycle, at what stage of family development is your nuclear family (parents and siblings) at the present time?

   • In my nuclear family, we are in the “single adult living independently” stage. At least for me it is, while my brother is in the marriage stage himself, and my two youngest sisters still live with my parents. I’ve been in this stage since my mother first kicked me out of the house when I was 18 and I had to quickly find a friend who would take me in while I tried to figure out what my next steps were.

3. What do you think are the major challenges your family has faced relative to the family migration cycle?

   • I think that one of our major challenges is assimilation. The textbook mentions that the dominant culture has to accept us into the culture, and that’s a lot of the time where we have seen these struggles. We lived in a predominantly white town, Oroville, and at the time there were almost no Mexicans living in the town. So, even though I’m fair-skinned, and so is my family, and we don’t speak Spanish, we still stuck out. People would immediately spot us and it almost seemed like a mask they were uncovering on us. I wasn’t upset by this, I loved when this happened because I love being Mexican, but my parents and my brother would be incredibly upset by this. My brother would sometimes cry on his bed for days after someone even dared to say that he was Mexican. I do understand now though that they wanted us to play a role as Mexicans. They wanted us to perform, to bring guacamole to the party, to blast Norteño out of the speakers on our car, and they weren’t interested in validated our experiences being one of the only Mexican families in town.

4. What is your role in your family, thinking about it in terms of Sluzki’s model?

   • I wouldn’t say that these roles necessarily apply to me because I am a 4th-generation Mexican-American, and neither my parents nor my grandparents were immigrants. But if I absolutely had to choose one, I guess I would say that I’m the mourner. I’m the only one of my siblings who cares to reach out to family members, learn family history, learn more about our lost culture and foods, and learn what it means to be a Mexican-American. And I would say that this sort of role had led me to feel really disconnected from my family and I have had many therapy sessions where I’ve just cried about being the only one of my siblings that cares about it. Now I have my tía that I can talk to about it, since she was the same way, but that is such a recent development. We’ve only been talking for about 8 months, so we are still learning a lot from each other about our family and about our feelings about our family, and culture, and life in general.

Article Questions:

1. Summarize in your own words what Falicov's article is about (200)

   • Falicov’s article is about the different frameworks used in understanding the family unit and dynamics between family members. Each framework is different and they all have their own place, but not all of them can be applied universally. Especially when considering the differences in cultures and experiences of those who have migrated to different countries for new opportunities. So, Falicov offers a new framework, the Multidimensional and Comparative framework, to gain a greater insight on cross-cultural differences in families in order to help them maintain a healthy lifestyle that fits within their own culture.

2. What are some of things that you have learned?. (name four)

   1. I’ve learned about the migration narrative, and how that helps families to assign meaning to the move that has changed their life and consider their own feelings and history.

   2. I’ve learned about the Dominant Dyad, which is the “preferred central relationship”, meaning the relationship that the rest of the family kind of revolves around. In the US, this dyad is the husband-wife dyad, but this does not apply to all cultures. Some cultures it may be the father-son, or mother-son, or other combinations depending on which culture you’re studying.

   3. That the ways that therapists in the US have been trained in the past has been based in Anglo-American cultural norms, so ways that other cultures live their lives with their families has been heavily pathologized. Like one of the examples in the article, how not leaving the home at the “appropriate time” can lead to pathologization, saying that this member that hasn’t left yet may have some mental health disorder such as schizophrenia. This is important because there are other cultures where leaving the home at all isn’t the norm or is frowned upon because they are collectivistic.

   4. I’ve learned that the comparative approach is not being proposed to replace the ethnic-based approach, but that both of these approaches should be used at the same time to give the therapist a greater insight and knowledge on where the family is coming from in order to help them.

3. Why do you think this article is relevant? Is there anything that applies to you and your family? why/why not? (200 words)

   • This article is especially relevant in a country like the U.S. because we are supposed to be a “cultural melting pot,” and though I don’t necessarily agree with that term, I do think that it implies that all cultures should be able to co-exist. But, how can we co-exist if we can’t recognize that we come from a specific cultural background. Anglo-Americans do not recognize that their culture is ingrained in their actions and thoughts, they don’t think of it as a culture at all, they think of it as just being “the norm,” and there is no cultural competence. How are they supposed to recognize someone else’s culture as being relevant within that person’s life and family dynamics in order to help them?

   • I think that there are a few things that apply to me, specifically the Dominant Dyad being mother-son in my house, and how that has actually hurt my relationship with my mother and my brother at the same time, but in order to get help from someone, I would need someone who is well-trained in this framework so that my mother and brother aren’t pathologized as having an inappropriate relationship.