What exactly is my culture?

I’m doing some “homework” for work, reading What If I Say The Wrong Thing by Vernā A. Myers. One of the lessons in the book is about being culturally competent. The author describes an experience in China where locals gawked her at. She felt uneasy about it at first, but quickly learned about how gawking in Chinese culture is not frowned upon. And she also learned that people in China will point and stare at people who look nothing like them.

It’s not just China, by the way. I had the same experience when I visited Korea nine years ago. I was much taller than many of the people there, and I was dark-skinned compared to almost all of them. Some kids on the metro train even took pictures, then smiled and bowed when I nodded at them. Then only other tall people where White and Black people from the nearby military base.

I also learned that it is frowned upon to take pictures of other people without their permission. A woman was on a stationary bicycle in a public event, and she was doing some sort of competition on it. I took a picture, and another woman who identified herself as the sister of the woman on the bicycle confronted me about it. She asked — forcefully — that I delete the image, which I did. Nevertheless, I took a lot of pictures in and around Seoul, and many people were in them. Most were not exactly the subjects of the photographs, but some were… I wish I would have known more of the rules, so that’s what I get for not asking.

My cultural incompetency aside, the more I read the book for my homework assignment before the DEAI training we’re getting, the more I questioned myself and my own culture. The TL;DR about me is that I was born in Mexico, raised mostly on the border between Juárez and El Paso, spent most summers and holidays in the ancestral hometown, and then moved to Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, in 2000. I worked in Waynesboro at a small hospital for seven years before going to work in Baltimore at the state health department. From there, I wento Hopkins while working as a consultant for a local health department, CDC, and a couple of companies. Then I got the job at Fairfax, and now I’m in Philly.

Which culture do I belong to, given all that? Am I Mexican because I was born in Mexico? Mexican-American because I am now a US citizen and have lived longer in the US than in Mexico? Spanish is my first language, so I am Hispanic. But I don’t speak it as much, speaking mostly English at home and at work. And, in this part of the United States, I’m more likely to run into people of Central American descent than people from the northern part of Mexico. (Those folks are more concentrated in the Southwest, with a few enclaves here and there, but not in Maryland/DC/Virginia/Pennsylvania.)

That all doesn’t stop people from coming to me to ask for help understanding people of Latin American descent. Lately, the question has been around the term “Latinx,” a non-gendered form of “Latino” and “Latina.” People want to know if it is the right term. It is and in it isn’t. To my friends and family back in Mexico, “Latinx” is confusing. And, the more I think about it, the more I’ve come to see it as an Anglicization of “Latino,” which we use in Spanish to describe someone (male or female) of Latin American descent. (Latin America being every country south of the United States, and the Spanish-speaking countries and territories of the Caribbean. We even use it to include people from Brazil as Portuguese is a “Latin” language.)

Then again, I am not someone who has lived in the United States their entire life, and I am college-educated (now with a doctoral degree). I don’t work in the service industry, or in the fields. My experience is different from the average immigrant. While I once lived in what could be described as abject poverty (and that is for a post later), I now live comfortably and have a profession only few people have. I’m not the Mexican/American/Latino everyman. This gets compounded when I am asked to be voice of the “minoritized” people where I work and/or teach. If my experience is nothing like the experience of the average immigrant, then it is definitely nothing like the experience of a Black person. This is especially true of a Black person in the United States who can trace their lineage back to the days of slavery.

This is not to say that I cannot empathize and understand the points of view and life experiences of people of a different culture and background than mine. For example, having read up on the history of slavery and institutional racism in the United States, I understand why so many Black people have trouble believing in vaccines. Seeing how people of Asian descent have been treated in the last few years, after the 45th President of the United States blamed the COVID-19 pandemic on China (and only China), I can see how they are worried of being victims of violence at any random time for any random reason. And I’ve read up on what President Jackson did to indigenous people in the 1800s, so I can see why tribes are weary of any kind of partnership or agreement with the federal government.

Getting back to the title of this blog post, what is my culture? When my brother-in-law saw that I chose “White” as my race and “Hispanic” as my ethnicity in the 2010 census, he seemed confused. I had to explain to him the difference between race and ethnicity, and the other weird categories we put ourselves into. And then I had to explain to him that my background was — for lack of a better term — “complex.” I was born in Juarez, Mexico, in the late 1970s. While I lived on the border much of the time, I also spent long summers and holidays in Aldama, a small town in the mountains in Chihuahua. In fact, I feel that I am more a son of Aldama than of Juarez.

We got our permanent resident to live and work in the United States in 1990. Mom moved my little brother and I to El Paso, where we went to school. As before, we would return to Aldama for the summer breaks and holidays. Later on, when I was in college, I would travel to Aldama on random weekends just because. (Gasoline was less than a dollar a gallon, and I had a car with a four cylinder engine.)

When I graduated college in 2000, I moved to Pennsylvania, so the trips back to El Paso — let alone Aldama — became harder to do. On the other hand, I started making friends and working on my master’s degree when I was up here, and my culture changed. Heck, I even went from tilting toward the “conservative” side of the political spectrum (thanks, Texas!) to tilting to the “liberal” side (thanks, Public Health!). Once I got married, my culture changed again, from the immature young man to the family man. And it would change again when I became a father.

So I leave the description of a culture to groups or populations, not individuals. I fit into many cultures because of my origins and experiences, but I don’t think I have one culture of my own. This also makes it difficult for me to assign any labels to myself. As with the census, I think I fit into different categories, and those categories have been applying to me because of my life experiences. And, yeah, I know that people will want to categorize me for their own purposes… But that’s for another post at a later time.

Thank you for reading. Please check out more of my thoughts over on my Medium.com blog at: https://medium.com/@epiren

Or listen to my ramblings on the Epidemiological Podcast: https://anchor.fm/rene-najera

Stalk me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renenajera/

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