Cultual Diversity In My Community

Cultural diversity is a major epidemic in this world today. There are many small towns that do not want to deal with the diversity of people and do not want to accept diversity into their community. My community, which is known as Princeton, was developed in the early 1800's, and we are one of those communities. The most common issues with cultural diversity are race and gender. Although the majority of people in my community feel that the days of cultural diversity are long gone, I would have to beg to differ with them and bring to their attention a few of the opposing issues that still occur here in our community.

As our textbooks have taught us, cultural diversity has been alive since the beginning of time and from the way that it looks, it will continue to be around. As mentioned in our textbook the dominant groups would use the minority groups to labor for themselves. (Schaefer, 2006) The community that I live in is known for its cotton, onions, cantaloupe, and lumber. In the 1880's and 1890's our community was one of the largest markets for bos d'arc logs. The first cotton gin was built in 1895. In 1936, 297 train cars of onions were shipped out of our community. As the years went by, the onion distribution was replaced by cantaloupe farming, which became and is still a major part of cropping for our community. In 1912, our community was incorporated. By the 1930's the cotton, onion, and cantaloupe farming was so large, the representatives of the community requested a migratory farm labor camp from the Farm Security Administration. The camp housed 300 to 400 immigrants during the picking seasons until the camp was closed in 1969.(Bull, 2007) They were brought into the community to work these farms and were housed away from the dominant groups. According to some of the elderly people of my community, the minority groups were treated horribly and hardly received pay for the labor that they performed.

The majority of the people here in my community have many similarities. One of the most obvious similarities would be that the community that I live in is extremely small, yet starting to grow, and the majority of the population is white. There are very few minority groups in my community. The numbers of Hispanic families are more than any other minority groups; yet, they remain secluded to their own homes and rarely attend any of the public functions. It is extremely unusual to even see them outside at all. It seems to that that they live in a modern day ethnic enclave. Even though the Hispanic children do attend our public schools, they too, do not go to many school functions. All in all, these families keep to themselves and go outside our community in order to socialize with others. As far as African American families in our community, there are even fewer than the number of Mexican American families. These families live outside the city limits, and are definitely segregated from the other races. These families live in their own community separated by a one-mile bridge leaving out of the city limits in which they all share. Not only are they separated by the bridge they have also been confined to one area of land known as Knob Hill.

In our community the leaders are all from the dominant race and seem to show favoritism to others in the community of the same race. It seems if you are not of the dominant race, you do not have or at least are not entitled to an opinion. You are also not acknowledged when you are trying to express your opinion for or towards the community. The only business owners in our community came from the dominant race, which are White people. The employees were all from the dominant groups as well. All of this remained true until just a few years ago, according to Jayson Bull (2007), City Council member. The change came about only when there was a Mexican food restaurant that was trying to open in our community. According to Bull (2007), after the business owner went through an extensively long drawn out process that was totally needless, in order to obtain a building permit, it was not until the city officials realized that the prospective business owner was also from the dominant group that the permit was actually granted. Once the business was established, the owner began to hire in employees from the Hispanic race. The elderly people of the city petitioned for the restaurant to be closed at once. There were no substantial evidence for the closure and therefore the petition was not granted.

The community refused to allow any type of growth to come into it, especially when the business owners were from a minority race. Due to the rapid growth surrounding our community areas, the city was forced to agree on the expansion and growth of the city (Bull, 2007). Without the decision for approval to expand the city and businesses, the city itself would have eventually been taken over by the rapid growth of all the surrounding cities. Once the agreement for growth and advancement took effect, it has slowly begun to allow immigrants of all races the opportunity to move into our community.

If it's not enough for our city leaders to be against the culture diversity, our long time members are as well. Therefore, a lot of the population refuses to go to the businesses that are owned by someone of a minority group. This situation has gotten so bad that some of the citizens completely refuse to go into a store or business if there was someone of another race working inside. The younger generation of our community is more accepting of the different races that are moving into our community. With this, it makes the discrimination and prejudice less obvious and less seen. The younger generations of our community choose not to discriminate against minority owned or operated businesses.

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