Culture and Perception Essay

Culture and Perception Culture is a way of life, it is passing down knowledge, beliefs, values, and traditions from generation to generation in a specific group. When you think of language, music, religion, art, etc., you’re thinking of culture. Cultures can cause diversity throughout the world. For example, we wouldn’t have Mexican food without Mexican culture and we most likely wouldn’t have Chinese food if it wasn’t for the Chinese culture. Culture is what makes the world work. This paper is going to be about the Mexican culture, the difference between the U.S and Mexican culture, and how mass media impacts intercultural communication. Cultural identity is when features of a culture help define and characterize a group (Ferdman, 1990). Like everything else in life, culture has to go through a change but it’s still connected to its roots, core beliefs, values, and its principles. The Mexican population mainly speaks Spanish, but there are some differences depending on where you are at. Just like any other culture, there are different styles of speaking that Mexicans do. To sound more affectionate, Mexicans tend to add ‘ito’ or ‘ita’ at the end of a word (IES, 2020). Just like everywhere else in the world, the people of Mexico or even just regular Spanish speakers, use slang words. If you were to hear someone use their slang words and you tried to put it into Google translate, you would most likely get the wrong translation because it isn’t the “proper” wording. They would get the literal translation and wouldn’t completely understand what they were trying to say. Like many cultures, the Mexican culture has it’s set of values and beliefs. Mexicans love hosting parties and making people feel comfortable. An important cultural value is familism and also the desire to keep close relationships, having an obligation to the family, and using family as a way to define the self (Knight, Gonzales, Saenz, Bonds, German, Deardorff, Roosa, & Updegraff, 2010). Mexicans can have a party for anything but there’s one that’s pretty important. A quinceañera is a girl’s 15th birthday that starts her journey from girlhood to womanhood (“Quinceañera”, 2019). It’s both a religious and social event that emphasizes the importance of family (“Quinceañera”, 2019). This is only a little bit about the Mexican culture. While Mexican and American culture have some similarities, they are quite different. Mexican culture obviously stems from Mexico and American culture is just from the U.S. In the U.S, their profession tends to be put before family while in Mexico, they always put family first (Acapulcos, 2015). In American culture, they raise their children to be independent and eventually move out but in Mexican culture, it isn’t that odd to see huge families still living together. Religion wise, the U.S has a little bit of everything but in Mexico, it’s predominantly Roman Catholicism. With language, English is mainly spoken in the U.S, while in Mexico they mainly speak Spanish. Mass media has an impact on almost everything. The media has brought together human interaction and society in a highly connected level, but it challenges intercultural communication. If you reveal too much of your personal information in any kid of media, it can cause problems in establishing relationships (Chen, 2012). So not only can the media bring together different cultures, but it can also cause them to judge the others. Depending on how the media portrays a certain culture, that can affect how other cultures view that one and whether or not they can form their own judgments. For example, since Trump has become president, the media portrays Mexicans to be horrible people. They are called rapists, animals, etc. Some of them don’t care if they were born here or not, they have made so many judgments about Mexicans that they now have a bad reputation. Obviously, this isn’t true for all media outlets or all Trump supporters but there are those who actually believe that these judgments/stereotypes are true. This is one way of how the media can divide the population and how it impacts cultures. Since culture is defined as passing down values beliefs, etc. through generation to generation, it’s pretty much a way of life. Mexican culture isn’t as simple as one would think. They have a different belief system from others, and they have a different way of viewing family, but what culture doesn’t? Like any other culture, the Mexican culture differs from American culture in many ways including language/speaking styles. Those were all explained in this paper, along with the impact the media has on communication.