Moving Up

According to multiple sources, the middle class makes up about 68%of the U.S. population. These days, it’s getting more and more difficult to move up from poverty due to many circumstances that are beyond one’s control. The lack of cultural, social, and economic capital makes it difficult for people to escape poverty. However, there are still many instances in which those who’ve experienced poverty their whole lives can move up, ensuing a sense of culture shock in which one might find themselves caught between two different worlds.

Joan M. Morris’s Moving Up from the Working Class is a collection of testimonies given by sociologists who grew up in working class families. The testimonies given in this excerpt exemplify what it’s like to be a part of this social class and how difficult it can be to attain upward mobility. When I was a year old, my family migrated to the United States from Mexico, upon our arrival, my parents had no more than a few hundred dollars in their pockets. For the first few years, we slept in a garage with three other family members. Eventually, we got kicked out by the city and we had nowhere to go. Today, my parents own multiple properties and make enough money for things like vacations, cars, and my college tuition. This transition was a dramatic one as we went from having nothing to having more than enough.

In this excerpt, Morris talks about the difficulties a working class member might experience when applying for college. By the time I was 14 years old, we no longer had to worry about shelter, clothing, or food. However, growing up in the working class meant that no one in my family had ever been to college before. The idea of going to college was encrypted in me since I was old enough to understand what it meant. My parents always told me that if I didn’t want to work in the fields, I would have to obtain an education and finish what they came here for. As the first child of an immigrant family, there is a lot of pressure on me to succeed, the same goes for those who are working class. Being an illegal immigrant meant that the application and financial aid process were going to be a little bit more difficult for me. It was hard for me to find answers to many questions that I had because there was a lack of resources for DACA students. When it came time to apply for school, my lack of social capital meant that I would have to do these things all on my own. For my first two years at Delta College, I was paying around $2,000 per semester because I was not aware that there were financial aid opportunties for DACA students like myself. Recently, Delta has opened up a DACA resource center, which is something that didn’t exist around the time I started going to college. However, it makes me happy to know that resources like this exist because so many working class/immigrant families don’t realize that there are people out there who want to help. It’s not impossible to move up from the working class, but it’s important to understand that for many people, outside influences might make it extremely difficult.