“Maintaining the wholesomeness of ones identity is one of many ongoing struggles people undergo throughout adulthood” (Andresen, p.67) Although I am relatively young in terms of my time as an adult, my identity has went through many changes and has frequently been difficult to stay the same as I continue to learn more and progress through life. Over the course of the last few years, I have gone through a few crises surrounding my identity and how I feel I can identify myself. At age 18 I thought my identity was clear and I was at peace will all components that make up my identity, and while there are still similarities between how I identify back then and now, I feel that my identity has become more specific to my ancestry and the cultures I am a part of. Entering college I only identified myself as a Latino male who identifies with the culture from El Salvador and hip-hop. As time moved on and I learned more about myself, it was only a matter of time that the way I describe my identity would change. Three years from the start of my educational career at the University of Washington my identity has changed to being a heterosexual chicano male of Indigenous Salvadoran descent (Mayan & Pipil) with Spanish, Jewish, and African blood who identifies with hip-hop and skateboarding.
While it appears that I am able to lay out what my current identity is now, the process that took place for me to get it there was far from easy. Given that I was born in the US and my skin is light I had a difficult time identifying with other Salvadorans as I didn’t appear as a “real Salvadoran” to them. After being told by one of my cousins who lives in El Salvador that I wasn’t “real” I struggled with what defines a “real” Salvadoran and what they look like. This struggle came back at PWU when we discussed the topic of what a “pure” or “full” American/Filipino is and how we define it. In terms of being American, I identify as a Central American, which to the dismay or disbelief of others is still American. When the idea of American is brought up I try to consider that America is North, Central, and South, each with different nations and cultures that make up the regions. An example of this is how Canada is a part of North America and Chile is in South America, both are countries that are American but not in the sense that many believe. When many ask me if I am American, they skip over the possibilities of other nations than the US and refer to them as their respective nations (such as Honduras and Hondurans). Even within other countries in the America’s I have noticed that many refer to the United States as America and the citizens within the United States are Americans but they themselves are not American and use their national identity in lieu of the title American. This direct connection between America and the United States made me wonder why so many nations only refer to citizens of the United States as Americans and at the PWU discussion I was more curious as to how whiteness was the standard for defining a “pure” American when there are so many countries in the Americas that aren’t white.
Connecting the association between US and its citizens as America(ns) and whiteness to our discussion at PWU, I found that a lot of these beliefs came from the miseducation faced by the Filipinos. As I read Constantino’s Miseducation of the Filipino, I noted that from the early days of colonial education and throughout history, the teaching regarding the United States have left the Filipinos indoctrinated to believe that the United States is what America is defined as. In addition to the teachings within schools, it was the introduction of western economic entities and popular culture/media that pushed many into believing that the epitome of the United States citizens and by default “Americans”. The best example of western media feeding the belief of “pure” Americans as whites was the image on page 182 of Miseducation of the Filipino, where the billboard displayed Sylvester Stallone as Rambo. While Stallone is an Italian descended actor, his career as an actor in the United States depicts him as an American to other nations, which when constantly seen through other white actors further builds up and for some provides all the more reason to believe that all “pure”, “full”, or “true” Americans look like the actors in films or shows. An interesting image I found was the first result on google images when I typed in “average American”. After seeing this image a question I pose is if we as a society reach a point where “average American” is not white or easily defined to individuals as white?
Works Cited
Text
Andresen, T. (2012). Knowledge construction, transformative academic knowledge, and Filipino American identity and experience, In E. Bonus & D. Maramba, (Eds.) The “other“ students: Filipino Americans, education, and power. (pp. 65-87). Charlotte, NC: IAP.
Constantino, R. (1982). Miseducation of Filipinos. In I In A.V. Shaw & L.H Francia, Vestiges of war. (pp. 177-192). New York: New York Press.
Image
http://media1.s-nbcnews.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/061017/061017_average_hmed_12p.grid-6x2.jpg
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