The two pieces assigned to read this week were vastly different. The first "Looking for Work" by Gary Soto was a narrative of a hispanic boy growing up in a predominately white 1950's United States. The second piece by Stephanie Coontz entitled "What We Really Miss About the 1950's" is about the misleadings of the nostalgia producing era. Soto's piece was easy to follow and engaged the reader from the beginning. He created familiarity that allowed the reader to see things unfolding almost as if it was happening on the pages themselves. Coontz's piece was much more difficult to be engaged by. Nearly every other line was filled with statistics and numbers. This made it hard to concentrate on the actual content of the piece, I found myself trying to process all of the data and make sense of all the facts being shot at me.
I think Soto was trying to convey that everyone in the 1950's was trying to create the homes they saw on television. I don't think much has changed in modern times. We are still driven by what sitcoms and reality t.v. show tells us is "normal", or rather, happiness. From what I could gather I think Coontz was trying to make the statement that the 1950's weren't really about tight knit families who learned life lessons on a daily basis, but more so about putting on a happy facade and sweeping problems under the rug.
In my opinion Soto's piece does challenge the American family ideal. I think it humanizes it. The narrative projects how a real family would go about daily tasks. Soto's family might not ideal, but it is certainly realistic. I would say Coontz piece also certainly challenges the American family ideal of the 1950's. Her statistics proved that even after inhaling all of the Aqua Net in the world we can't deny that the media displayed the American family under the most ideal standards.
I think the thing I find the most interesting after reading both of these pieces is that I still feel a great deal of nostalgia for the 1950's.
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