Ryan Manley's 1102 Blog

  I learned a lot in this course, not just about Latinx communities but about research in general. A better way of describing my experience of taking this course would be that it opened my mind. I have not taken a course like this and it really opened my eyes up to the research process, particularly for museum exhibits and what happens behind the scenes to put one together. Something I found unique about this class and the project in general, is that we started with questions about Latinx communities, but the primary goal of the class was not necessarily to answer those questions specifically. Our group strived to answer some of those questions, but because of limited historical research on some of these topics, we were allowed to readjust our questions as we researched.      Something else that was encouraged in this project was actually to find as much information about our research topic as possible. A lot of times, while writing essays in the past, I actually ha...

 There has been a discussion among our class and readings of whether of not the term Latinx is acceptable to describe those of Hispanic/Latin American decent. Its a tough question and in my opinion, there is not one solid answer. Over the past several years, we have seen a large shift in American culture on how we view gender/sexuality and have tried being more inclusive. We have seen an increase in people become more accepting of calling people by preferred pronouns and a lot of people also be more open about their gender. Changing the term Latino to Latinx I feel is an attempt to become more diverse and inclusive at the same time. It was intended to allow Americans to shift our focus from not just being gender accepting in our country, but also among people from other countries. I truly feel that those who came up with the term Latinx had the best intentions in mind. They developed the term with the purpose of being more inclusive while talking about people from Hispanic origin...

     This week is an interesting week for me because I finally wrapped up the research process. I found it to be such a great experience to delve deeper into learning more about the Latinx community and the way their experiences can be seen through their art.       The readings this week discussed how secondary sources can speak to each other and I find that to be a great concept. As time goes by, secondary sources can reference and learn from other sources to help expand or show conflicting arguments against other sources. It really speaks to the research process as a whole and makes me think of how this concept could have affected my research process. As a researcher for this project, I wanted to find as much detail as possible about the Latinx community, and as I delved deeper into Contrapunto it was much easier to find primary sources of individual artists. Contrapunto Art Group Jorge Arcos- a local Latinx artist Cataline Gomez-Beuth- another local...

       The readings this week really emphasized the concept of culture and assimilation for me. It summed up some of the observations I have made so far in this course and really solidified them by reading first-person perspectives from Latin Americans themselves. While Spilling the Beans emphasized the way cultures are developed, Wild Tongue demonstrated how many view America as a melting pot for immigrants. Even though the story of Spilling the Beans may seem simple, the purpose of reading this passage is to show that people from different families/countries each have a unique culture. It embraces the fact that the Latinx community, for example, has a different food culture than Americans, but also that within Latinx community, there are smaller cultures as well.       What reading Wild Tongue did for me, however, was emphasize the way immigrants are treated in America. One thing I have noted throughout several blog entries so far is this common...

  As I continue studying immigration in this course, I tend to notice different trends or central ideas that cross between all areas of research. A couple weeks ago, I wrote my blog post discussing the concept of hostility. I described how many students from Green Card Youth Voices faced hostility when arriving in the US, and how it is something that many immigrants in general have encountered. Racism is something deeply embedded in our society and as I read immigrant stories, it just reinforces that concept.      In this blog post, I want to discuss another common theme- the difficult immigration process. When reviewing the course readings for this week, I came across the “I-485 Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status” and found how lengthy and nitpicky the application is for immigrants to fill out. The form is 20 pages long, in small font, and asks so many questions. Seeing all these concise details required to file status reinforces the conc...

  This week I visited the Marietta Museum of History. During the visit, I had a chance to meet the Curator of Exhibits, Amy Reed, and get to see the current exhibits they have at the museum. She started off by telling our group how her job is to get history out into the community. This museum is one of the only museums in the county that focuses on our local Cobb County history and she feels that it is her job to inform the community and visitors about our history. The first exhibit we looked at was The Man with the Camera and it was my favorite part of the museum. Amy told us the story of how back in the 1940s-60s when civil rights were being fought for, people did not know necessarily what was going on “on the other side of the tracks.” What she meant by this is that Whites did not necessarily know what Blacks were doing because they were in separate communities. However, there was a man with a camera known as Mr. Burford, who took photos of the African American community and the...