In my little town

I get in my car and take a drive around town. A few blocks from my house, I see my favorite tacqueria where my team would go to eat after our longer workouts. Just down the main street, I hear the echoes of the previous night’s festa and witness the empty red cups (and tumble weeds) rolling along the canals. The pungent smell of cows snakes in through my open window, and with it come memories of a time when I never considered any of this to be “culture.”

For 19 years, I lived in a self-contained community that saw little of the outside world. Hardly anyone left the outskirts of the town, and when we did, we almost always came promptly back. The new neighbors down the street came from as far away as the next town over — and that was just about it. In this vacuum of ideas, beliefs and identities, I saw my own experiences — as pleasant as they might have been — as nothing more than the flavorless norm. To me, culture was something witnessed by those who had the money to get far, far away from my town. When I was finally given the opportunity to come to the other side of the country, I hoped to see and be a part of one for the first time. Indeed, I did finally see culture, but at the cost of becoming permanently disconnected from it. What's more, once I had paid that price, I ironically found myself to be a legitimate member of the Princeton community.

I am the son of an Azorean-Mexican-Redneck hometown. During my time in Tulare, Calif., I went to quinceaneras, Portuguese festas and, in my younger days, to roundups and rodeos every few weekends. Now that I am at Princeton, I recognize the uniqueness and special quality of this eclectic combination. Through meeting people from India, China, France, Italy, Mauritius and — the strangest place of all — the East Coast, I have learned to see my own life through the eyes of others. The lifestyles I have encountered at Princeton break all the rules of good old Tulare, denying my belief that I had lived a standard life. In the diversity of others, I am finally beginning to see my own cultural contributions to the colorful nature of campus life.

This sudden understanding does not come without an exchange. In my new outsider’s perspective of my home, I have lost that connection that held me captive to my previously tiny universe. When I lived in Tulare, the central valley of California was the whole world to me, and I knew nothing other than that. Now, I am forced to face the truth that Tulare is but a subset of my cultural experiences, and this realization creates a gulf between me and those citizens of my town who are still fortunately enclosed in the womb of security and assurance of familiarity with every niche of their existence.

Besides the dramatic conclusion of my exclusion from my former life, I suppose this means something else about my cultural inheritance as a Princeton student. Some, like me, are unexposed to anything beyond our own backyard. Others, like so many people I’ve met at Princeton, are citizens of the world. Regardless of these varying levels of exposure, we all come to Princeton as a set of outsiders, donning an outsider's view of the places from which we hail. Together, we are a society of misfits, simultaneously reveling in our myriad cultures and mourning our loss of homeland sympathy. As a final farewell to our past, we ally ourselves with refinement and worldliness while dissociating from our minuscule personal histories.

This, then, is the source of camaraderie of college life at this university: We hold on to this campus and the people we meet here for the sake of having a place that is even less grounded than we are. Our collective disembodiment creates a fellowship, and while everyone we meet lacks the familiarity that one shares with childhood friends and family, we share a mutual disconnection and relish the fact that tens, hundreds or thousands of miles away from the places we know best, we have come home again.

Joey Barnett is a sophomore from Tulare, Calif. He can be reached at jbarnett@princeton.edu.