Social Location

Each person throughout the story of their life experiences very different situations which will shape their future. One of the most defining factors that determines ones outcome is social location. Location being the area in which one was raised or the time in which they grew up would play a large role in this process. The other factor, in my opinion, the most important in shaping the human life is stratification which explains how race, gender, and class will play a role in a person’s life. Finally, social location is summed up by showing how all of the above factors contribute to the life chances that one is afforded. By examining the life of one person (myself) and comparing to the life of another (Cesar) I will show how social location has shaped our lives.

Space- I was raised in Charlotte Hall, Maryland, which was by all rights a farming community, although not everyone had a farm. The area that I grew up was mainly middle class though there were some people in these areas who were less fortunate than others. In my younger years my father taught me the value of hard work through the daily tasks he assigned me i.e. mowing the lawn, splitting fire wood, and digging up old tree stumps that were in the yard. Many of my friends had to do the same sort of work for their parents; it was just what you did as a child. When I was in my mid teens many of my friends were of legal age to drive so we started to branch out and we would frequent many of the Washington D.C. hot spots that were usually in the urban areas of the city. These urban areas opened my eye to many of the experiences that Cesar who have grown up with. In what was Cesar’s part of town, drugs were an every day part of life, if he wanted to work as a young man his only options were to sell drugs or commit crimes. Cesar did not have the opportunities that I did, opportunities like mowing the grass or working on farms to earn a little extra cash. In my mind this may have been the defining moment in both of our lives which would send Cesar down a path very different than my own.

            Cesar lived in a lower class community that did not afford him the chance to break out of the norm and live a productive life. He had to “fend for himself” where as I would later work many jobs in order to earn an honest living. I was raised in a way that showed me how to succeed in life although the option to follow this path was inevitably up to me. Cesar was not given the tools one would need in life to succeed so he followed the lead of those around him, his mother did drugs and his mentor sold drugs, the obvious choice for Cesar’s profession was is the drug trafficking trade.