My Family Experience Analysis

This paper is about the experience I had when my family and I took a trip to Mexico, to visit the town where my father was born and grew up. I draw on the experiences I had there like having dinner with my extended family, and the stories told of their past, in order to reflect and contrast the life my father lived and the one I potentially could have led if my immediate family did not assimilate into American mainstream society. My experience connects to post-modernity and “thick” and “thin” identities that people grow into and out of as their life progresses from birth into adulthood; this all depends on the environment and whether that environment changes into a modern society or stays true to its traditional norms affecting the people within.

In his work, Giddens states that ‘individuality’ has surely been valued- within varying limits- in all cultures”, and while that might be true, there are still many cultures that have not reached this level of freedom of choice (Giddens, 75). I did not know that households like my aunts were still in practice, how a husband can still see his wife as his property, to be at his disposal whenever he wants. The body and the topic of possession brings me to a point Giddens has stated in which he believes “the body is not just a physical entity which we ‘possess’, it is an action-system, a mode of praxis, and its practical immersion in the interactions of day-to-day life is an essential part of the sustaining of a coherent sense of identity (Giddens, 99). During that hour in which dinner took place, that statement Giddens made could not be more inaccurate. I asked myself how people could still live that type of lifestyle, but everyone in that small town held similar values. How could one person progress their beliefs if their whole environment lives in this pre-modern society? The way people choose to live their life in my father’s hometown is dictated by the generations before them, they do not know anything about individualism and self-reflexivity because they cannot afford to go step away from this culture filled with limitations and roles that were taught to them since

My father’s family living Michoacán, Mexico hold strong traditional values that they practice and pass down to their children as it was passed down to them. The evolution from a traditional to post-modern era was a shift that I never really took into consideration as of how it affects the lives of my family members and myself. “Thick” identities can be left behind and evolve into “thin” ones for the following generation of children, like it was for my siblings and myself, when a person’s environment changes from a traditional setting to a post-modern