A CASE IN POINT: AN ETHNOMETHODOLOGICAL STUDY OF A POOR MEXICAN AMERICAN FAMILY.

This article presents a study, which focuses on poor Mexican American family. The Mexican American, then, like any other member of society, not only engages in what a scholar calls "judgmental work," but in doing so constantly relies upon the background knowledge of commonplace settings which he presumes he shares with others. That is, the Mexican American in managing his everyday affairs presumably does not comply with preestablished and legitimate alternative courses of action as spelled out by the dominant culture's normative abstract explanations of human behavior as described in most sociological theory. Rather, he tends to rely upon commonsense understandings of social structures about which people have little knowledge, and not upon the idealized norms that have been attributed to his failure or social status in the larger society by social scientists. True, the idealized norms of the social order form part of his background knowledge, but they do not fully explain how he goes about interpreting the norms to make sense of the many situations the Mexican American finds himself in and which may not have anything to do with his cultural heritage.