Final Reflection

After a semester of taking of Film 150: Multicultual America, I have definitely broadened my horizons when it comes to present day issues of race and class differences. Throughout the semester, I worked with St. Michael's Congregation in several activities, mainly related to helping out a mainly immigrant population in Milwaukee from countries within Southeast Asia. The ethnicities according to our book would definitely be considered Asian, but while talking with the residents of the area, I could definitely tell there were a lot of differences in each individual culture.

The activities that I personally helped with wee several area cleanup projects, which were run by St. Michael's Congregation and ACTS, a program set up by St. Michael's to help clean up the area, which had hit crime rate highs in the 1970's and 1980's when the primarily white population started to move to the suburbs or pass away. While participating in this activity, I found that these people, though low-income, had a lot of self-respect and self-confidence. They had these qualities, because they own their own homes, and help to keep the community clean.

The other activity, which I worked on at the end of the semester, was a Soup Sale, which was held at St. Michael's congregation on Sunday, December 13, 2009. The soup sale was held after the first mass in the morning, which was a multi-cultural mass. This multicultural mass was held in not one, not two, but three different languages to accommodate all of the immigrants that lived in the area. It also had a unique feel to it, but when people started to sing, in their own languages, it kind of made sense. Though the words were all mixed in, it seemed as though there was a certain harmony to it, which was just plain out phenomenal. During the soup sale itself, I found that the people within the community although from different countries were able to find certain similarities, which made them stronger together as a group. Also, I was able to find that there was a certain mixture of cultures as I was told that the food was made up of different cultures. For example, small differences in spices, within the egg rolls, made it based more from one particular country as opposed to another, something that I would have never known otherwise. (An egg roll is an egg roll is an egg roll to me.)

Overall throughout this semester, I feel that it was a great success that helped me to broaden my horizons. Not only in a sense of being more ethnically aware of certain stereotypes, but also in a sense of class difference. I feel that from going forward, this class has helped me to be less judgmental as I’ve realized there are more restrictions out there in the world, than I initially thought.