The Tension of Opposites: Exploring Issues of Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in My Identity Formation

Having grown up in the inner city, I feel as if I have come a long way from where most of my peers are at right now. Many of my friends from elementary school did not graduate from high school and many of the ones who did now have children and seem to have their life set. I am a twenty-one year old female, now a junior in college, with many goals that I have yet to reach in my lifetime. Although I do not have any children and plan to get my B.A. from Umass Boston I feel that outsiders still consider me a "girl from Chelsea." What exactly is a girl from Chelsea? She is someone who grew up in a low-income home with poor educational skills and who is going to college, but will still end up like all the rest of the girls, married with children. Inside my home it seemed as if my parents where raising me to become a homemaker and to break out of that meant breaking the norms of my family. The identity I ended up achieving inside my home, strong, not very lady-like, confident, and assertive does not seem to be an identity that is accepted outside my house. I think about all the "successful" women I see on the television, and they seem like they have money, are beautiful, have the perfect bodies and they always seem to have a man by their sides. Many of the women whom I know of that are actually changing things in the world are barely talked about and do not seem to be surrounded by riches. Exactly what am I working for by attending school? Will I end up with a job that pays me a decent salary and end up with kids and a husband to take care of? In this world that seems to favor those who have riches and money, do I actually have a chance of making a lot of money without hurting other people? Should I waste my time trying to gain my rights as a woman when this movement has been taking place for so long and women are still paid less than men and this struggle for the equality of the sexes is still so prevalent? In my analysis of my identity formation many of the concepts described by Dorothy Smith, Erving Goffman and George Herbert Mead have helped me understand society and how individuals live it. How did I come to understand how my social world functions? Examining the theory of social construction of reality by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966), I am able to see how I broke the expectations of society and my family and created my own to fit my needs and desires. Inside my house my mother cooked and cleaned for our whole family. My father worked and when he came home his meal was ready for him and all he did was sleep. While growing up the only chores my brother had were to take out the trash, and shovel the snow, while my sisters and I had to wash the dishes, clean the table, mop, sweep and wash clothes. When I was young I saw this as objective reality, a social order that I was to follow because my mother did this, her mother did it and every other woman alive also did it. Although I obeyed my mother and father I hated doing chores, cleaning and cooking. I did not understand why I had to stay home while my brother was out playing until the late hours. As I grew older I was determined to change my life and that is where I started rebelling against my parents, trying to make my reality subjectively meaningful, in distinction from how society imposed its means on me "objectively." In the beginning it was very difficult for my parents to accept my decision to go out and have fun with my friends. Already they felt alienated when they arrived at the United States from El Salvador. They felt that their beliefs went against the beliefs of other people in the U.S. and that if they did not have control over their children they would grow up to be drug addicts or that the girls in the family would end up pregnant at a young age. By not becoming the "respectable wife" they wanted me to be, I was breaking the traditional norms in my family. It took a very long time and many days of arguing for my parents to realize that I was not going to follow in their shoes. …