No Place Like Home

No Place Like Home

There’s No Place Like Home Nasiche Rose Texas State University NO PLACE LIKE HOME 2 There’s No Place like Home I grew up in the borough of Queens in New York City, the daughter of Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents. Growing up I never felt out of place. New York is a city made of immigrants and multicultural individuals.

The de facto segregation that is found all over the city fosters an environment that celebrates cultural uniqueness rather than sow dissension between human beings. Moreover, the concentration of cultures highlighted each one’s uniqueness and ultimately strengthened the melting pot ideology that this country boasts of. Families and the community here lived and worked under the premise of collectivism. Sure the city had its downfalls (and potholes) but it was rich in culture and one I came to love. This was my world, one full of life, color, music, and the best food I’ve ever had.

My dad joined the military however, and from that point on we got a chance to move all over. I lived all over the east coast, and had the fortune to live overseas in Germany and visit 10 different Western European countries. But even these cultures did not feel so different to me. In fact, being of another culture myself, seemed to give me somewhat of an advantage. It made their culture seem more familiar to me in many ways.

We practiced many of the same social norms in my own family probably in part due to European colonization of the Caribbean islands early on. It wasn’t actually until I moved to Texas that I had this alien-like feeling. Understandably so, moving to Texas was a bit of a culture shock for me. Originally I thought, like most people that have never been to Texas, that it would fit a stereotype. There would be vast open land, cowboys and horses.

It would be a place full of Republicans that loved their guns. People lassoed animals and cacti for fun. We would have to live on a ranch and drive miles and miles just to get to school. But like most people who come to Texas, I quickly learned this was not the reality. Though there were bigger plots of land than I had ever seen, our house was not on a ranch but in the suburbs down the street from school.

The fashion didn’t include ten-gallon hats and chaps, but hoodies and shorts (although they did wear cowboy boots). Much to my disappointment, there were no horses either, just a lot of pickup trucks. And the vernacular was so strange to me, I had never used “y’all”, included “finna” into my vocabulary, or said “fer” in the place of for. But then, most of my native Texan friends could say the same for me. In spite of being back in the states, I felt a great cultural distance, and could sense that I was not a good fit (Heine, 2016).

It did not make sense to me and to some extent still does not. I whole-heartedly refused to give up my heritage or integrate any part of this bizarre culture into my own. I kept to myself because I did not want to learn their customs, I wore coats when it was cold not hoodies, I dressed differently from other students, always talked with and accent and without as much as a thought of frame-switching. I actively maintained a great deal of separation from the host culture (Heine, 2016). Then I moved to Austin to go to college at the University of Texas at Austin.

The great thing about college is that it is exactly the right place to expose yourself to other ways of life. At the same time, you find yourself unconsciously becoming part of an inclusive camaraderie founded in school spirit, a culture in and of itself with its own customs and traditions (Heine, 2016). Also, living in Austin, the city that revels in the motto, “Keep Austin Weird,” gave me quite a wakeup call and magnificent transformative experience. For me, both UT and Austin itself came to represent a reminder to accept all people and embrace that which you may not know or understand. So often people fear and seek to rid themselves of what they do not know or understand for fear of being uncomfortable.

I was no exception. I had written Texas off as the worst place in the world. I, who had prided myself on seeing the beauty in diverse ethnic cultures, lost sight of accepting all types of cultures. Since living in Austin, I have continued to maintain friends of all different ethnicities, I’ve worked as a nanny for a lesbian couple raising a daughter, become great friends with a drag queen, and even ate breakfast tacos and went to a rodeo. There is a beauty that lies in the fact that acculturation does not have to mean assimilating or completely giving up the heritage you love.

Acculturation can be additive rather than subtractive; it can mean sharing a perspective for others to learn, as you learn from them. Much like the way it is in New York City, our differences, cultural or otherwise, provide us an opportunity to not only celebrate, but to educate and better ourselves. The differences that make us are not meant to be divisive; they are not good or bad, better or worse, just different. In understanding this, we can potentially grow toward greater acceptance and tolerance of others. Though we might not always agree with each other, we can learn to understand one another.

Truthfully, we may never achieve total world peace, but that is a good place to start.

References

• Heine, S. J. (2016). Living in multicultural worlds. In S. J. Heine (3rd ed.), Cultural Psychology. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.