2nd reflection post - scarface

Cuban 3rd wave and Scarface the movie. When doing my readings this past week I felt slightly familiar with some of the material as though I had learned it before. I didn’t realize until discussion however that this familiarization was from cinema and not another classroom. Scarface is a movie about on Cuban immigrant’s rise to power in the Miami drug scene. The movie opens with him and his friend coming to Cuban in the 3rd wave of Cuban immigration after the revolution, also called the Cuban Crime Wave. He faces the struggles of a new arrival to the country working dead-end low-paying jobs. His frustrations grow until his first career opportunity is presented to him – drugs. Because this is the first opportunity he has seen for a job with upward mobility, Scarface takes his role head on. This kind of off-the-boat ambition shaped a view of immigrants. Scarface had little or no chance to become a somebody in the US legitimately. He little education and few marketable skills. The drug industry, however, ignored that- it was the only way he could see himself rising to power in his new home. I can remember being young and naïve as a 10 year old in a tiny white town in NH and wondering if this is why negative stereo-types existed. If maybe people were driven into these roles in the dangerous fringes of society and then hated for their role. This all goes back to the invisible immigrants versus hyper-visible immigration that was discussed on the first day of class. The first wave of professionals coming from Cuban was relatively invisible, but the third waves which was saturated with criminals made a bad name for all Cuban immigrants.