Dishabituation

I did not realize that my culture was significantly different than anyone else's because I was (relatively) unaware of culture. I knew what it was — had heard of it before — but did not understand it. When I was in grade school, my peers were not minority students; we were all just students. I didn't eat Latino food or dance Latino dances; I just ate and danced. I had nothing to contrast these parts of my culture with; I lived in a state of blissful ignorance. Then, somewhere between the first time I had to check a box on my college application that labeled me Latino/Hispanic, non-white and now, I became fully aware of the way that ethnicity is used to modify the aforementioned nouns — food, dances and people — outside of the primarily Latino neighborhood from which I came to Princeton.

In my new world, it seems that everyone can be associated with one culture or another, more specifically, the majority culture and any number of minority cultures. Based on my experiences at Princeton, it feels as though people who are categorized along these lines of separation do not mix, and any effort to mix comes from the person of the minority culture.

Life at Princeton has changed the way that I view the world and at times how I view myself. You see, I adopted the label Latina because it made me comfortable to explore a place 3,000 miles from home with a group of people that was somehow connected to me by that label. I willingly took it on and even embraced it.

I became more Latina. In my first year, I became the vice president of Accion Latina and the co-coordinator of Latinos Unidos for Networking and Advising. When Danza Kuduro by Don Omar y Lucenzo came on in the Black Box theater, my non-Latino, minority (because let's face it, you rarely see white people in the Black Box) friends would look over at me as if that were my song. And I loved it. I love being Latina. I love rolling my “r”s. I love dancing Merengue, Cumbia and Bachata. I wouldn't trade the traditions that I share with my family and many other Latinos for anything in the world. But before Princeton, being Latina was not my defining characteristic, and it definitely was not an identity that I consciously recognized.

Now, when I am standing in line at El Tapatio, the local supermarket back home, I look around at all the brown faces and I feel jealous; I envy their unawareness. I envy the way that they, the people in my ethnic enclave in southern Los Angeles, live their lives, never truly thinking about their Latino-ness. I envy that they are still able to measure their self-worth by their character, their perseverance in the face of obstacles and their work ethic. I envy that none of these qualities fluctuate because of their differences in culture in the way I feel that mine do. I wish that I were still unaware that I have a Spanish accent, that Latino music is not played at every party and that somehow I am different. Most of all, I wish that my “different” didn't feel inferior outside of my brown community back home.

The realization that the world that I will be working in when I leave undergrad will be more like Princeton than like the community that I grew up in terrifies me; in this world, I will feel Latina first and everything else second. This year, in an effort to explore the majority community that is culturally foreign to me, I began distancing myself from the Latino community that I have always felt comfortable in. I joined a sorority only to realize that I had to work harder to feel as though I fit in, and this was not only because of an arbitrary label, Latina, that automatically made me different but also because I do not share the same culture as the majority of the girls who make up this sisterhood.

In my search for assimilation and integration, I found that this idea that we can all become part of one big society with a shared set of beliefs is unattainable and undesirable. I realized that the reason ethnically segregated groups exist at Princeton is not because minority people only feel comfortable with other minority people, but rather because it feels forced to be part of someone else's culture. It feels forced to be part of organizations that have always been primarily non-minority, that continue to cater to the majority culture.

I am torn between two worlds; in my dad's words, “[I] come from a neighborhood where the minority is the majority”; I am a proud Latina, and while I love my culture, I am not only Latina. When I am outside of my primarily brown enclave, I really become part of the minority, and as of now, it feels as though there is no amalgamation between these two communities. I could never let go of my culture, but I will not continue being part of a community in which everyone shares the same culture after Princeton. I wonder what this new community, a community with a growing number of members of different cultures, will do to make room for the culture of those of us for whom assimilation and integration has been less than successful. How will our cultures mix so that one does not dominate the other? How will the tables turn so that it is not always the person from the minority who is seeking acceptance into the majority's culture but those in the majority culture who will seek to understand, partake in, adopt and appreciate traditions of our cultures, which we are more than willing to share? I encourage others to share their story to create a dialogue that will begin to change how we think about culture, race, ethnicity and nationality because while this is my story, this is also the story of countless others.