Refining Mexican Self-Identity: Toward a New Dialogue in Cultural Co-Creation, Essay Example

Maintaining a strong cultural Mexican self-identity is important in the United States, where prevailing cultural “norms” discourage identification with a particular ethnic minority.  Those who are born in America are expected to forget history, to overlook ethnic and cultural “uniqueness.”  Since how we think about the past influences how we think about ourselves, rediscovering “lost” history can help to create a new dialogue in the communication that creates cultural identity and mutual understanding.

Mexicans can point to a glorious history that’s thousands of years old.  Indigenous Meso-American peoples, the Mayans, Olmecs and Aztecs, for example, left legacies in astronomy, mathematics, agriculture and architecture that rival the great Mediterranean civilizations.  For Mexican-Americans, too much of this has been relegated to the category of “hidden history” (or perhaps “obscured history”), because to overtly identify with a past out of step with Eurocentric values contradicts and challenges the still-prevalent notion of “melting pot.”

As has been noted, cultural identities are co-created through the communication process, but avowed and ascribed identities often come into conflict.  Americans ascribe to Mexicans qualities of thrift and a willingness to work hard, characteristics that most Americans themselves value.  However, to a Mexican, they might appear as assigned traits that further a stereotype of static socioeconomic existence, which precludes the possibility of upward mobility.

A Mexican not seeing through the prism of American cultural bias would instead emphasize an avowed trait that reflects a strong sense of responsibility to family and a determination to provide opportunities for their children.  In other words, core American values.

In her article “Happy to be Nappy! Embracing an Afrocentric Aesthetic for Beauty,” Regina E. Spellers asserts that, “constructing identity in a racist environment can be a complex and difficult task” (p. 74).  As a Mexican, it’s frustrating to confront persistent racist stereotypes, particularly subtle ones.  It’s an insidious phenomenon that colors one’s self-image at a subconscious level.

For an American national, equality is an expectation, supposedly blind to ethnicity.  As a Mexican with a strong cultural self-identity, it is a source of terrible frustration that, despite being from a bounded culture, the racial implications are not the same as those for someone from a German, Italian or Irish background.  This is in spite of the fact that Mexico has had a relationship with the United States that dates from the early years of the American Republic.

It’s difficult to overstate the impact of Catholicism on the Mexican national character and on the identity of a young Mexican-American.  Inseparable from Mexico’s cultural identity, Catholicism has historically been a powerful anti-colonial agent among Mexicans, for whom the Virgin of Guadalupe remains a symbol of independence as well as a religious touchstone.

However, America’s traditionally Protestant outlook has too often portrayed the relationship of Mexicans to their church as a strange, mystical fusion of native superstition and a slavish devotion to Rome.  As someone with high (perhaps naïve) expectations

of religious tolerance from Americans, this dominant attitude has had a disappointing effect, particularly in that it appears to make a distinction between the Mexican church and the perceived “mainstream” Catholic church.

Our cultural identity within the American ethnic “quilt” is difficult to establish when the term “American” remains a nebulous one.  What is the proper meaning of “Mexican-American” within that context?   One is proud – justifiably so – of Mexico’s cultural heritage given the richness of the country’s history, its vibrant cultural background and independent nature.  But the historically garbled nature of cultural communication between Mexicans and Americans makes it reasonable to doubt whether there is “justifiable” reason to expect white Americans will come to share that pride and accord Mexican-Americans the respect to which they aspire.

Works Cited

Spellers, Regina E.  “Happy to be Nappy! Embracing an Afrocentric Aesthetic for Beauty.”  Articles on Identity and Intercultural Communication.  May 5, 2007.

Culture of Mexico – “Traditional, people, history, clothes.”  http://www.everyculture.com/Ma-Ni/Mexico.html.  2010.