I’ve been thinking a lot about my culture recently, and there’s a lot there.
My ancestry is broadly southern European, mainly Spain, Portugal, and Italy with little pockets in Austria and the Netherlands - but I am mainly identified with southern European and Spanish-speaking culture, especially as a Latin American. I was born in the US but grew up in Mexico up until I was 9 years old when my family moved back to the US. As such, I stopped growing with the Spanish language and engaging with Latin culture at the age of 9, there was simply no more reason to engage with it. My parents spoke Spanish and I spoke Spanish with them, but my entire world was English. All of my friends were English-speakers, my education was in English, all of the media I consumed was in English… Spanish quickly became irrelevant and I quickly did not even think in Spanish anymore.
This continued into adulthood. For the longest time my knowledge of Spanish became a corner in my mind which felt more and more useless by the day, even my sisters don’t use Spanish much anymore. I thought, okay, this is it, this is the end of the line for the Spanish language, my kids probably won’t even speak Spanish, I’ll probably forget to speak it at some point… and that will be it. What use would my kids have for the Spanish language in the US?
But something didn’t sit right with me. It felt like I was purposefully giving up my culture, my language, letting myself be consumed by a different language and different people. I began to think of my ancestors in Spain who took the entire Iberian peninsula back from Muslim invaders and proceeded to conquer the whole world thereafter. They who had the greatest kingdom Europe had ever seen. How sad would it be, after all the fighting, after all they’ve endured, after all the great distances they’ve traveled, to just give it up because… I didn’t see the point in speaking Spanish?
This tension was mostly unconscious for me, it built up over the course of years and it’s not until very recently that these feelings have come into my conscious awareness so that I may articulate them clearly. It started welling up when, suddenly, I started having trouble speaking in English. This was extremely bizarre, I’d spoken in English perfectly ever since I was a little kid, I never even had an accent. But all of the sudden articulating my ideas became very difficult and I began having a slight accent when I speak. This was so strange for me and it was seriously distressing… how could I have an accent out of nowhere? How could I struggle to speak a language I’d been speaking perfectly for years?
It kind of clicked all at once… I am not a “real” American. My ancestral tongue isn’t English. I didn’t grow up with my parents speaking to me in English… they were speaking to me in Spanish, especially during my developmental years between birth and 7 years old where the messaging around you largely becomes ingrained in your subconscious… for me this entire subconscious programming was done in Spanish, a language I’d largely been refusing to engage with.
So I went out on a limb and began speaking to myself in Spanish, which felt extremely weird. Even weirder, I began making myself think in Spanish and write my notes in Spanish. I even began listening primarily to Spanish music (not the ghetto kind). This was extremely jarring at first, but quickly it became extremely comforting and like a complete breath of fresh air. It was almost as though I’d been casting water spells my whole life and suddenly I was able to cast fire and water spells. Psychologically, I felt more complete. My voice literally got deeper. I became more confident. Held eye contact longer. I realized I wasn’t a random avatar which spawned without a story or explanation, but somebody with a rich lineage who’s presence was heavily contextualized. It felt like I knew who I was in an effortless way. The image from Paulo Coelho’s Alchemist came to mind where the treasure I’d been looking for was at home, right beneath my feet all along.
This image of the de-culturalized person is more prescient in second generation Indian-Americans, Asian-Americans, or other similar groups where they grew up in the US away from their parent culture; they typically don’t speak their parent’s language or if they do it’s to a very small degree, they have little to no hope of reclaiming their original culture as they’ve become so completely engulfed by American society - they probably would not even want to reclaim it on a surface level. As such, their behavior becomes almost a caricature of what an “American” is, inspired mostly by the media they grew up watching, resulting in a deeply inauthentic persona which is somewhat unsettling to observe and interact with. It’s like you’re interacting with the zoomer version of Troy from high school musical, or worse - somebody who’s mistaken a stereotype for how they’re supposed to act (this is prevalent in Hispanic culture where Hispanics become ‘Edgars’, ultimately becoming racial stereotypes as opposed to individuated personas). This made me think about how people who are identified with their culture behave. I began to think of my classmates growing up who’d speak Spanish with their friends, my American friends who operate entirely in their native language, these were often the most well adjusted people who had friends, community, a sense of family, and overall better outcomes than the more detached groups.
Soon after I began exploring the Spanish language, my troubles with the English language went away. No more communication mishaps, or weird accents manifesting from thin air. I was able to communicate clearly, confidently, and honestly in both languages. Most importantly, I stopped feeling like a foreigner here in the US, which is almost paradoxical considering this was achieved by exploring a culture foreign to the US (albeit not so foreign considering they’re neighbors).
In this exploration, I randomly came across a video of Lee Kuan Yew (founding father of Singapore) where he said, “I speak English better than I do Chinese… but I will never be an Englishman, not in a thousand generations… The deculturalized man loses his confidence, I know because this almost happened to me. You must know yourself… know yourself, know the world.” Coming from the founder of one of the greatest nations in Asia today (and considering I came across this clip entirely serendipitously) it was really reassuring that this was an identity struggle which many people in the past also grappled with, not a unique schizo imagining.
How to conclude? Know yourself. Identify the languages which were spoken to you as a child. Identify if there’s any dissonance in your life be it linguistic, racial, or cultural and find how you can reconcile it. Your culture does not, and should not, have to be abandoned just because you are living somewhere other than your ancestral homeland. Even if you operate in your native language, this could become a fun exploration of different ancestral languages (aka if you’re Irish you should learn Gaelic, if you’re German you should learn German, if you’re Italian you should learn Italian, etc.)
The greatest travesty arises when people become convinced that their culture is no longer worth preserving, but that is a travesty which need not befall upon you.