Entre Nos Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Entre Nos - Essay Example The movie proves to us that lack of immigrants’ cultural understanding, close friendship and interpersonal relationship in a city results to frustrations, mistreatment and suffering of immigrants in the cities. As Zukin (1995) analyzes, culture is a powerful tool for controlling cities. Culture is a summation of social, economic, linguistic, and political aspects of life and how people in a particular setting execute these components in their unique way. The video is an account of an experience by Mariana; a wife and mother of two young children, Gabriel and Andrea. Mariana’s husband, whom they have immigrated to live with in New York City, abandoned the naive family at the city. Unable to settle bills, Mariana is evacuated from their rented apartment to the streets and things get worse when she discovers that she is pregnant. In addition to her lack of knowledge of the language spoken in the vicinity, she has not employment or work experience. Language is a powerful to ol in life and immigrants are sometimes constrained and limited when they can not express themselves in the middle of strangers. Inability to understand the language of New York makes it difficult for the family to adapt to the culture of the city given that culture is inculcated largely through language. One of the inevitable thing that city immigrants should establish is social network; a powerful tool that members of the society can use for survival. In the vast urban environment, such as that of New York where Mariana and her two kinds were struggling to survive, social network could have been a way of soliciting for support from friends and neighbors. For example, immigrants should have a way of communicating and associating with their fellow immigrants, neighbors or those close to them. For example, if Mariana had known another fellow immigrant in the town, she could have been assisted because not all immigrants suffered the tragedy. In fact, the story would have been differen t if her husband stayed and continued to support his family. Another survival tactic, which ensures safety and security when one gets to a vast urban environment is creating close friendships with the people one is close to; either neighbors, workmates or associates. Close friendships makes a person to acquire and amass enough social, political and even economic security because friends can help in finding a solution in extreme cases instead of learning the hard way like Mariana. Moreover, close friendship is a significant part of social life and, as noted from the movie, much of the agonies that Mariana and her two kids underwent were as a result of lack of close friendship. As it is known, men are created solitary beings, but necessity forces them to create social networks because there is no survival in isolation. In this case, cities are depicted in an influential cinema as tragic places where people are not concerned much about their neighbors. In cities like the one Mariana wa s living, the owners of property such as tenants in urban areas are exceptionally capitalistic, and they are only concerned with their economic gains and not social welfare of their tenants; it is an economic regime that does not consider those who do not have. Economic challenges are, therefore, not a concern of the owners of resources in cities. For example, we see the owner of the apartment where Mariana and