I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted - they were wrestling for cultural influence over me.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the struggle of balancing two cultural identities influenced by both parents.
Luis Alberto Urrea reflects on the internal conflict he faced growing up in a bicultural environment, where his mother sought to instill an American identity and his father aimed to preserve their Mexican heritage. This wrestling for cultural influence highlights the complexities of identity formation in individuals from multicultural backgrounds and emphasizes the significance of family heritage in shaping one's sense of self.
In practice
In a speech about cultural diversity, this quote can illustrate the struggle of personal identity in a multicultural society.
When I was doing missionary work when I was younger, which started this obsession of mine with the literature of witness, I was a translator for a missionary group, and I spent years in a Tijuana dump. People were really thrown by the fact that the Mexican poor, many of them pureblood indigenous people, seemed happy.
I came to believe the green fuse that drives spring and summer through the world is essentially a literary energy. That the world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing - and that thing was story.
African-Americans are not a monolithic group. So, we tend to talk about the black community, the black culture, the African-American television viewing audience, but there are just as many facets of us as there are other cultures.
A resilient culture has a certain amount of resistance embedded in it. Not so much to capsize it, but enough so that it doesn't atrophy.
Teenage girls have so much sway over culture, yet people sneer at the things that women and girls love, and are contemptuous of the creators of that content, particularly if they are women.
India is a country that lives in several centuries simultaneously, and her people at any given time and place encapsulate all the contradictions that come from being a multi-cultural, multi-religious and multi-lingual society.
I had seen the photographs of Harlem in its glory days, stylish men in bespoke suits, women so well dressed that they'd put the models in 'Vogue' to shame. I knew that Harlemites loved to dance, to pray, and to eat.
Looting has an immense impact on our ability to understand our global cultural heritage; once these objects are gone, so too is our chance of piecing together humanity's shared story.
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