Just Like Us- Blog Post 3

At this time of the book, the four girls are sophomores in college and excited to not be the scared freshman on campus anymore. At the beginning of their sophomore year they all moved to the same dorm at the University of Denver. Marisela has branched out from her friends Yadira and Clara by living with different people but they still hang out together for a majority of the time. The three of them signed up for a class about Social Inequality. There were many instances where they talked about poor people not having many advantages. One student in there class said, "It is so common that labor liners are drawn in certain ways. Like, different groups do certain kinds of work, and I'm just like, this is that way it is"(182). It is really sad to me that that's the way people think now-a-days; that a certain race has a specific job and that is the way that most people in the United States think when they are talking about work force in America. What really shocked me the most is that when everything happens in the class the girls don't stick up for themselves. In book it says, "But otherwise the students of color remained silent, allowing the white students to dominate the conversation. When I asked why this was so, the girls from Roosevelt said they had grown weary of trying to educate other students about what it was like to be poor"(182). This helped me feel a little better about the fact that the girls wanted to stick up for themselves, but people just don't understand and they were sick of explaining it. It amazes me that the girls went through all the things that they went through in their life; coming across the border, handling school and handling the fact that they did not have visa or social security cards. I think I understand why the girls do not want to keep explaining their situation. I feel like no one can ever experience what someone is going through without actually walking in their shoes or experiencing what someone else experiences.