Embedded Assessment: My Cultural Identity

Embedded Assessment 1: My Cultural Identity My cultural identity is unlike any others. What you eat, wear,music i listen to things i do, and say all define who you are. I am my own person and there is no one exactly like me.

Do I know who I am? Am I who I think I am? What makes me, me.? There’s a lot to know, and still so much more to explore and learn about myself. There are three main aspects about my life, that symbolizes who I am as a person. My cultural identity is based upon values, appearance and my life itself. I love who I am, and who I am becoming. My happiness and intelligence is what makes me stand out from others. I’ve always put my best foot forward and make the best decisions for myself. I am half Indian, Caucasian, European & Mexican on my mom’s side of the family. On my dad’s, I am Half Jamaican on my dad’s side of the family. Both of my parents taught me different ways around life and what is expected of me. But the three things that sums up my cultural identity are food, fashion, and family traditions.

The tradition of education in the African American culture implies the cultural values of the better opportunities for the family. Education provides an efficient ways to avoid the struggles that other African American’s families had to endure to provide a stable life for their families. An understanding of your ethnic culture

At around the age of 4, I was the only one from my immediate family that was born here in the United states at the time. I have this clear memory of being in the car with my family, and my siblings were making fun of me because I am American, that I wasn 't Mexican like them. I felt embarrassed and wanted to be Mexican so bad like them. I never noticed race as a thing before, until my own siblings pointed it out. It just became more obvious to me over time.

My cultural identity can be identified by my age, the food I eat, and the music I listen to. My favorite foods define who I am because, Louisiana has very different types food. Crawfish, Gumbo, Alligator, and Boudin are examples of some of the foods i like. A lot of people, like me, put Tony Chachere’s on their food. Just something as simple as liking spicy foods can make your culture different.

Throughout my experiences in this course so far, I have had many opportunities to reflect on my own past and have begun to better understand my own cultural identity. It has been much more difficult to wrap my head around than I would have predicted it to be because so many things play into the construction of an identity that it can be hard to look at all of those separate pieces together. My cultural identity, like all others, is more complicated than it first appears. I identify as a white person, a woman, an American, a gay person, and a feminist, just to name a few. While all of these labels carry with them stereotypes and expectations, they also interplay with the cultural influences I was subject to throughout my childhood. So, in looking at my cultural identity, I am examining both my own labels and what they mean to me and layering on top of that cultural influencers that operate within my life and how the interplay between these layers works.

One's Cultural Identity Everyone's culture differs, it is one way that distinguishes one from others. It is acquired, everyone is raised from it, and it determines the way one view the world and others. Imagine being in place with others that have different perspective of culture. Culture greatly informs the way one views the world and others.

I had the grand honor of being born into a culturally diverse family. Although Dominican culture dominates our customs, we are 25% Middle Eastern from Lebanon, and 25% Spanish from Barcelona, Spain. The cultures have all laced into each other in such a way that I find it utterly ordinary to eat Arabic food while listening to Dominican music while serving Spanish desserts. My parents came to America at around the age that I am now, met each other, and my mom had my first sister at 18 while my father was 22. My mom went back to high school to finish her GED while my father enrolled in an institution that he never got around to finishing because his english was not well.

I don’t enjoy listening to music in Spanish nor do I enjoy some traditions my family has. I’m white washed they say and perhaps I am, but my parents don’t recognize that I grew up in a completely different environment than they did. For that reason, I feel a sense of loneliness and alienation for not matching the cultural identity of my parents. I would describe my cultural identity as a grapevine. I stem from my parents’ roots and their values and customs, but as I grow up I change.

My grandmother, my mother and I all have the same views on our racial/ethnic cultural heritage. We are proud to be African Americans but we do not deeply identify with our heritage. We are glad to be African Americans but our goal in life is to just be successful. We acknowledge our African American history to educate ourselves on ethnic culture, but we do not think heavily about our racial culture. This may be because we do not really have a specific African heritage that we can deeply identify with.

The world is filled with people, and like snowflakes, each person is not the same as another. Each person identifies with different aspects of their lives to create their own personal identities. I personally identify with my Italian side of my family to help form who I am today. I have found myself connecting with this side more so than the other parts of my identity. It affects how I live my life by becoming the center to the culture surrounding me.

Through most of my life I grew up not caring much about my heritage and background. I was told by my father that our heritage was primarily German and Native American. Since I was young around that time I did not think much of my heritage. However, as time progressed I grew curious of who I actually was. One day I asked my father the same question I did several years ago.

My parents came from another country and made the American culture and way of life their own like other immigrants before them. Because of this I can deal in a unique way with cultural or racial challenges or tensions.   My parents did not let their culture dictate who I am but let it be a part of who I would become.   For that I will always be grateful. I hope that in the future the percentage of Hispanics in my community grows, but my experience of being such an extreme minority in a community close to a major, modern city gives me a truly unique perspective.

I began taking steps to establish my own identity, interacting with a variety of different people, Christian teachers, Jewish friends, my Black mother, White father, and classmates that span multitudes of sexualities and ethnicities. As my life became more varied I came to see that the ties to both sides of my family

On my mother’s side is a mix of Pontian Greek and German. My maternal papou’s (grandfather) line traces back to the 1730s America. This part of the family is almost completely ignored in favor of my maternal yiayia’s (grandmother) heritage . My mother’s family only follows Greeks tradition though.