Free «Latin-American Social Issues in the Articles by Martinez, Ocampo, and Ramirez» Essay Sample

The field of social problematics possesses different dimensions and aspects; that is why it requires the use of multiple approaches and ways of the problems’ representation in order to provide the full analysis of the issues researched. That makes inevitable the coexistence of different forms of the texts that concern separate fragments of the same social problematics field. Thus, having read the articles by Ruben O. Martinez, Anthony C. Ocampo, and Horacio N. Roque Ramirez, each of which describes and researches some aspects of the issues in current Latin-American society, I consider that each of these authors uses some specific forms and methods that are the most appropriate in the context of the concrete works. The closeness of the themes discussed in the texts allows the comparison, but the different ways the authors use to express their positions cause the contrasting of the articles. The most persuading text is the article written by Martinez because the author appeals to the theoretical basis and proves it with the general statistics. Less persuading is the text by Ocampo because instead of statistics, he uses the ethnographical data that do not have such a full value. At last, the text by Ramirez has just an informational value and it is written in the form of essay with the use of interviews. Thus, the best way to organize the paper is to move from the theoretical base to the fullest account of empirical data as Martinez does.

The three articles compared concern different social issues of Latin America. Thus, Martinez claims that the ideology of Neoliberalism brings the negative impact to Latin Americans. Therefore, the position of this author is obviously leftist. He accuses the Neoliberalism because its general principle is “free market fundamentalism” in connection with “the principles of radical individualism, limited government, and flexible labor” (Marinez, 2016). According to Martinez (2016), all of those lead to racism, segregationist policies, and poverty in Latin American societies. The lack of the governmental support is the direct result of Neoliberalism, and in this way, Martinez involves great amount of sociological data to show how the realization of the mentioned principles leads to the decrease of the general level of life of Latin Americans. The author believes that the most important social factor is the economy, when other factors are derivative. In this way, in his text, he moves from the theoretical base to the statistical research’s interpretation; therefore, his sociological method makes the text very persuasive.

The text by Ocampo partly resembles that by Martinez. Ocampo (2011) also involves the theoretical base but in contrast to Martinez, he uses the method of ethnographical research and accepts only limited and direct but, at the same time, concrete and very intensive information. The main idea of his text is that through the prism of the cultural capital theory, “men who possess intersecting identities may be forced to negotiate competing, even contradictory gender value systems when ‘doing’ masculinity” (Ocampo, 2011). Thus, Ocampo tries to explain, in which way the Latin American gays construct their masculine identity in the context of the general social transformations. At last, Martinez’s text is an essay based mostly on the documents and interviews with the direct participants of the LGBT community of Latin America in the late 20th century called GALA (the Gay Latino Alliance). The author “highlights individual and collective efforts of Latina lesbians and gay Latinos to name self and group and mark identity and public space” (Ramirez, 2003). In fact, this position makes possible some form of a ‘dialogue’ between the article by Ocampo and the essay by Ramirez (both write about the interrelations between the gay and Latino minorities in American white society), but at the same time, these articles are very different because their authors use too different ways of the information’s expression. The same concerns their methodology. When both Ramirez and Martinez use different types of sociological methodology, Ocampo choses that of ethnography. Despite this parallelism, formally, the strict scientific article by Martinez completely opposes the essay by Ramirez with the article by Ocampo possessing the place between them. As for the content and the interrelation of the ideas provided by the authors, both Ocampo and Ramirez try to underline the cultural aspects of the Latino social inequalities, while for Martinez, the main source of them is in the economic relations realized in accordance with the Neoliberal ideological system. At the same time, all three authors describe the same inequalities and injuries provided by the white and heterosexual majority toward minorities. The most important common detail is that each author tries to show that most Latin Americans belong also to other minorities, except for the ethnical one. Thus, for Ocampo and Ramirez, those have the gender root, while for Martinez, that is the economic and general social humiliation of Latin Americans.

In such a way, the article by Martinez provides the fullest persuasion because it introduces the reader with the full theoretical tenet and then demonstrates how the theory works in the researched case. It means that the reader needs some full context for a correct interpretation of the data provided. In this respect, the article by Ramirez just provides data but neither explains, in which way the reader should interpret that, nor demonstrates some specific position of the author that should play the role of an interpretative key. As for the article by Ocampo, it is reasonably persuasive because it operates with the theoretical concepts and then demonstrates through the theoretical prism the data reached by the author himself. The formal irrelevance makes the dialogue between the articles compared very difficult, especially in the case of that by Ramirez that has a form of essay in contrast to the scientific articles by Martinez and Ocampo.