"keeping close to home"

In the essay “keeping close to home: class and education”, bell hooks opens her story with the fact that her parents did not want her to go away for college. As stated in the title of her essay and in her remarks, her parents did not want her to go off due to an “ignorance” marked by her family’s economic status. In presenting these contrasting ideas, bell hooks states that her parents, “like many working-class folks, they feared what college education might do to their children’s minds” (153). Undoubtedly this referring to the fact that receiving a higher education is viewed as climbing up to a new social standing. As believed by the majority of main stream America, it is quite normal to see kids in a family go off at the age of eighteen or nineteen to college and separate themselves for ever from their families. Most of these college students never live under their parents’ roofs again; it is almost unseen that students live at home during their college experience and beyond.

Unlike the American ideal of breaking away from home and growing as a person in college, the general Mexican culture believes that it is better for a person to live with their family until they are truly independent; that is, they leave home until they have a job or sometimes until they are married. When reading bell hooks’ essay, it was quite normal to see her parents’ hesitation, but the difference here was in their economic status. In most Mexican families, wealthy, middle-class or lower, the kids often stay as close to home as possible because it is in the mainstream culture that our families are the center of it all. In being so, newly bound college students tend to find a university in their city if there is one, or a college where they know they will have family close by. Unlike bell hooks, my quest in finding a college was more similar to that of other Mexican students. Although I had lived in the U.S. for the past five years, my parents still believed that it was necessary for me to stay as close to home, or at least Dallas which was more familiar. I have also come to see that there is more hesitation in leaving home by Mexican girls than boys. In the majority of cases, it is the daughters that often decide to stay home during their college experience, although there are always exceptions. It could be sad for some to see that I fit just that stereotypical mold that I have come to build of the majority of Mexican students, but I am just that. Being brought up in such a thigh-knit family environment, I saw it important for me to keep as close to home as possible while still having the opportunity to expand my knowledge and make connections at school.

Although I am not being bias in seeing these two different lifestyles, I find it interesting how the cultures of two neighboring countries see college in different lights. For Americans, college is a time to become complete independent from ones family and grow in their own way. For Mexicans, college is a time for students to maintain close contact with their families and continue to grow with the help of the people that care for them the most. Not taking into account the differences, it is good to notice that education above all, in both societies, is seen as the main ingredient for a person to succeed.