An Ethnographic Study of the Influence of a Mobile Home Community on Suburban High School Students

Abstract

This study provides an ethnographic account of a mobile home park with specific attention upon the lives of adolescents living in the park and attending a local suburban high school. A symbolic interactionist perspective is utilized. Historical factors leading to the mobile home experience, as well as present policies at the local, state, and federal levels, perpetuate the outsider status of the mobile home park dweller. The mobile home unit and the mobile home park defy conventional categories and are thus “polluted”; an extension of this attitude comes to attach to the consumer of the mobile home experience as likewise being polluted or undesirable. Furthermore, the park dweller appears in the eyes of the American “mainstreamer” to fail to uphold an important symbolic value: the sacred site-built house. Park students are shunned in the school and, when at home, tolerate an adversary relationship with park management. An aura of fear in the park is reflected in the passivity on the part of the tenants. Most importantly, his lack of belonging is an obstacle to the self-image of the park adolescent. He is considered profane in one-to-one relations and becomes part of a new minority group (the mobile home park dweller) in terms of other group relations.

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