Race and My Community

I am a White American that has lived in the same community since I was born. The influence of race in my community is fairly simple. I live in a small town with my group of people, Whites, being the dominate group, and only one other active playing minority group, Mexicans. The White people and the Mexican people have a feud against one another within my community. Racism and prejudice is quite high between the two races. Cultural differences and lack of accommodation within the community feeds the prejudice fire.

My community is about 65% White and 35% Mexican, so a majority of the community does look like me. The Mexican population in my community is huge mostly because of the agriculture situations here. We have a huge amount of orchards, and migrant workers come from all over. I would say during harvest season the majority of our communities’ population is Mexican. In my 21 years of living here I have probably only seen two or three Black, Asian, and Indian people. Our cities location does not bring in too many other minorities.

Being who I am and with my family heritage. Community leaders treat people like me very well. I can not say that I have seen too much discrimination when it comes to leaders in the community but I do know that when it comes to Mexicans our community caters to them more than I think is necessary. Most Mexicans in our community are illegal immigrants, yet the city seems to let them live here as long as they have not committed a huge crime against someone. I would almost say in that regard they treat Mexicans a whole lot better than us. Mexicans do get treated differently by police, and seem to always be harassed by them. The leaders of the community however, are always trying to accommodate Mexicans within the community and do so by building low end housing, building migrant worker homes and setting up special financial programs to help them out.

The community members treat people like me very well. “We all kind of stick together, and watch out for one another”, says Jaime Wilkinson. The city seems to cater to the Mexican culture and it almost makes the bond within our race stronger to combat the growing number of Mexicans. The most irritating thing in our community is most of the Mexicans live off the state which is our tax money. Unfortunately, people in our community treat other races rather poorly. Our people hold grudges against the different minority groups, because the city takes such good care of them. We will see numerous Mexican families driving down the road in a bran new Hummer but we still drive around in our little Honda Civic. There is this huge grudge against them, because they get things handed to them without having to do anything. During social gatherings I can feel the tension between everyone, and in some cases fights will break out because of cultural or racial differences.

Since my race is the dominate race all texts and work manuals contain information by or about people like me. More manuals and texts have to be printed both in English and Spanish. Legally employers have to post the minimum wage information sheets in both English and Spanish. Our community is becoming a dual language community, and so when you do see texts or work manuals more than likely there will be a Spanish version available right next to the English version.

Our local media represents people like us all the time, but usually all on good terms. Most of the crimes that I have heard about or read about deal with different cultures. I think the media treats people like me better than they do the minority groups. I think though this is mainly because the people who control the media are my group of people. Like I explained before we hold this grudge or jealously against them, so naturally the media is going to speak highly of our kind and demoralize theirs. Rarely do I hear about crimes committed by Whites in our town (2007).

The leadership positions in my community are filled by Whites and I have not seen a minority apart of any leadership position. “There is a low involvement rate for minorities in our community”, says a leader within the community for the Wenatchee Highs Reclamation District. Luckily for them, my community represents minorities’ interests very well. In fact at the beginning of this year our town made new town signs and it clearly states on the signs that this is a city that helps minorities. I think it mostly has to do with the agricultural situations of our area. Our community leaders want to bring in minority workers to pick the fruit. Unfortunately, we do not see too many Whites up in ladders picking fruit.

There are many inequities within my community mostly having to do with the minority groups. The Mexican minorities get treated