Wow, to define my own culture...thats a toughie. I´ve thought about this topic many times before as it has been a personal issue of mine all my life. I find it hard to define my own culture possibly because i suffer a mild identity crisis: i never know when to say I am Canadian or I am Colombian. Needless to say my version of an iceberg is a little messed up.
Let me summarize quickly: Born in Colombia; immigrated to Canada; raised in Canada; still longing for my Colombian roots.
Due to the fact I was brought to Canada at a very tender age of 3, I barely got to enjoy the pleasures of being raised in Colombia. Instead, I was immediately thrown into the Canadian education system where i learned to speak english, socialized with Canadian kids, and was taught Canadian values and customs. However, home was a different story. At home we spoke spanish, still ate beans and rice, and always watched the spanish soap operas religiously at 6:00 pm on the TELELATINO channel. So my culture has been a huge mash up-mix up of diferent customs, traditions, languages, and values. Just to make the story even more interesting, my best friend growing up was Romanian, and after many sleepovers and spending so much time at her house i came to love and accept Cabbage rolls, traditional Orthodox Easter meals that includes this amazing salad called salata de boeuf, and even picked up some romanian phrases.
So to me culture is not only the values, customs and traditions in which you are born into and will most likely carry with you for the rest of your life, but it is also those other customs and traditions that begin to stick with you because of the people and environment that surround you.
I can proudly say I am a Colombian- I was born there, have my family there, and continue to keep the customs of my heritage, I am a Canadian (YES, IAM CANADIAN DAMMIT) and I have an open mind and heart to other cultures- yes I eat romanian salads, love chicken tika masala, enjoy Serbian new years and their amazing meat pies, will wake up sunday mornings for Chinese Dim-Sum, and love my kimchi soups.
If the top of my iceberg contains so much mixture of things, I can barely begin to imagine what lies beneath the surface. The Bottom part of my cultural iceberg most likely contains a mixture and variety as well. The deep features of my culture (aka, the bottom of the iceberg) become more apparent when I am away from home.
Being in Mexico for almost one week now has proven to show me what canadian values I truly carry with me. I love my personal space and enjoy that sense of individual freedom one is accustomed to in North America. It is always this value that I realize is such a big part of me when I also travel to Colombia. I can relate to the Mexicans with never being on time, as I am always late, and as a result I have had no problem with patiently waiting for them for all the meetings, outings, events; I am guessing this is one of my more Latin American values rather than Canadian since Canadian society is so picky regarding timeliness.
But more important than anything else is always to have that open mind and heart to whatever or whoever is surrounding you at the moment.
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The really short second paragraph of your post reminded my of a concept i learned about in my race, ethnicity and power class. It is a hypothesis called the 3 generational hyposthsis.
ReplyDeleteBasically says the first generation of people immigrating to a country will have strong ties to their roots and home country, the second generation will totally acculturate themselves with the live style of the host country and the third generation will try to look back to reconnect with what they've lost.
I don't know how interesting or applicable that is to you but i find the more I talk to people in our generation the more I realize how desperately we would have loved to experience a portion of our parents upbringing. I wonder if being in Mexico is going to change how you see yourself with in the myriad of cultures around you. Good luck out there!!!
aj (a past intern)