Ethnicity

[joreth]

Ethnicity has come up quite a lot lately, which I think is a strange thing. Part of the reason I think it's odd is because no one can seem to agree on what "ethnicity" even is. Take my own, for instance. I'm half caucasian, which is, more or less, an issue of pigment, and half Mexican, which is an issue of governmental borders, neither of which has nearly the level of affect on who I am as a person as the geographic location in which I grew up. For some categories on the demographic forms, it's all about the pigment; for some, it's the borders on a map; for some, it's the physical geographic region; and for some it's the actual cultural influences regardless of where you were born or where your parents were born. Also, there is no consensus on how far back in our ancestry we are supposed to go to determine ethnicity. If my family came here on the Mayflower, when do I get to start calling myself American instead of English? If my several-times removed grandparents were born in Scotland, but only because the Romans invaded & impregnated the locals, are they Italian or Scottish?

I'm not really looking for answers to these questions because I think the question of ethnicity is pretty much a stupid, useless question. Only for certain medical issues does it even have any relevance, and the more we learn about genetics, the more we can pinpoint the specific genes that cover those medical issues, so we can stop calling it an ethnicity issue and start calling it a genetic issue.

In my opinion, the much more relevant question is what were the cultural influences on a person, rather than where were their 6-times grandparents born. It's more relevant, and it's also much more interesting.

I grew up in Northern California. NorCal has a fascinating history, filled with a spectacular clash of cultures. A lot of people hear "California" and think movie stars, Baywatch, Pretty Woman, Clueless, surfers, and hippies. And that's true, all those cultures are represented in California. But not only are they not the only cultural influences, they're not even the most well-represented. They show up in very specific areas, like Beverly Hills, San Diego, and Santa Cruz. But California is a very large state - one of the biggest in the US and bigger than many European countries.

In the Victorian age, California was flooded with immigrants from Asia, mostly China, which heavily influenced the entire flavor of the Victorian Era in America. Then, in the middle of the last century, roughly from the '40s through the '70s, we got another influx of Asian immigrants, this time mostly from Viet Nam and Korea (funny how war-ravaged countries tend to lose their citizens). So I grew up surrounded by a strong Oriental culture, from the accents to the decorations to the traditions to the modern cultural values of good education and over-achievement in school and sports.

But before all of that, before California was even a state, the coastline was explored and settled by Spanish missionaries. A tour of the coastline will show you some of the most beautiful examples of Spanish architecture from the 16- and 1700s. Then, throughout the centuries, fleeing from bloody dictators and revolutionaries, immigrants from Mexico and South America found their way up north to influence the local culture with a Latin flavor. In spite of the large Asian population, California is extremely, and I mean EXTREMELY, Catholic in culture (well, being settled by missionaries, what do you expect?). All of the good schools, both public and private, are named St. Something Or Other, and have old mission-style chapels and other trappings of Catholicism. If you can't say anything else nice about the Catholics (and I can't), you gotta admit they have some beautiful churches, and California is just littered with them - of all different styles.

Then, in the 1920s and '30s came the Dust Bowl. Migrant Farmers entered the state in droves, looking for work to suppor their families after their own farms dried up from the draught. They brought with them their Caucasian southern and midwestern influences, with their work ethic, pride in manual labor, adherence to tradition, and, of course, their accents. The blend of the different southern and midwestern accents all merging together in California evolved into what I used to call California Hick. It's a unique southern-style accent that I can't properly do anymore, but it is amusing to explain to people when they hear it slip out of me, that I CAME to Florida with that accent.

My accents are an audial representation of the history and culture that I grew up in. When I was a child, I had mostly a neutral accent. My dad was pure Norwegian (by way of his grandparents all being born in Norway), born in the midwest, so he had very little accent except for a few specific words like "warsh" instead of "wash". My mom is Mexican and grew up in Texas, so she has that curious Tex-Mex accent, which is mostly a version of Spanish with a little southern threw in. Sort of like "Hola, como esta ya'll?" But then she learned English in school at a young age, and in school they taught her "proper" English, so when she speaks Spanish, you can tell she's a native speaker, but when she speaks English, you can't hear any Spanish accent at all.

So, my parents had very little in the way of accents except for a couple of odd words now and then. But my city was still a farming town when I was a kid. So between the rednecks and my cousins who grew up in an even smaller town nearby, I developed a slight southern accent. My mom likes to tell the story of the time we went on a road trip, and dad had the CB radio in the car, and he was trying to get the truckers to tell us the time by using trucker slang, because he thought I would be amused at the whole thing (and, of course, I was). But truckers tend to not like it when city boys use their slang or their airwaves, so he wasn't getting any response. So I picked up the mic and said something like "can any ya'll big boys out there give me the time? C'mon back!" Apparently, the truckers found an 8-year-old charming and I got them to respond with the time.

But then I got to Jr. High, which was in the ghetto. I had the big, curly '80s hair, the giant hoop earrings, and the Chola accent (which is actually slightly but significantly different from the Cholo accent, although they are collectively the same culture). That was a lot of moving the head from side to side and clicking with your tongue, and mixing a Spanish accent with American slang and a few odd Mexican cuss words. Sort of like "[click] naww, puta, I ain't goin'! Whatcho think I am?" That's also an accent I can't do well anymore. I never liked that culture and I dropped it as soon as I no longer needed it to survive. The Cholo culture is gang culture. It's heavily misogynistic, violent, and religious. I think we can all figure out why I didn't like it.

But then I got to high school. I went to a private school in a VERY affluent neighborhood. That's where I picked up the Valley Girl accent. Even though my school was a full 8-hour drive north of The Valley, that accent, for some reason, became really popular among the affluent teens all over the state. Personally, I think of it more as the teenager accent, since it seems just perfect for the attitude that most teens seem to go through ... "Yes moTHER!" "whatever!" "OMG dad, you're such a FREAK!" "He TOTALLY, like, LIKES you!"

My high school, since it was a private school, had an orientation day, about a month maybe before school actually started, for the incoming freshmen to meet their teachers and learn the layout of the campus. My very first day, I was wandering around, and I passed by a classroom that had a couple of girls talking to each other. I heard "Ohmygod, I totally don't want to go here, cuz like my older sister, she, like, went here, and, like, all the teachers, they, like all know her, y'know?" So, as I grew into my teens and was constantly surrounded by "likes" and "totallys" and "ohmygods", that creeped into my accent on top of the "ya'lls" and missing "gs".

Also during high school, I joined the church choir. The church I joined was almost exclusively made up of Philipinos, many of them only newly-immigrated and the children my age were only some first-generation American-born. Philipino culture is quite a curious mix all on its own. It's sort of like a blending of Asian, Pacific Islander like Hawaii, and Catholic Spanish. Even their language has a mix of Latin-based Spanish words and Asian words. The other members of the choir were some of my closest friends for a couple of years, so the strange dichotomy of frantic, hectic movement & language, with a complete disregard of deadlines and time, also started to color my own way of doing things. Anyone who knows me in person knows I am physically incapable of arriving anywhere on time. I have to set my arrival time for anywhere between 15 and 45 minutes before my actual arrival time, just to be ON time. I know a lot of people joke about Poly Standard Time and Pagan Standard Time, and many other cultures that are laid-back about clocks and time, but where I grew up, it was Philipino Time. And I set my clock by it way back when and have yet to figure out how to re-set it.

In the middle of all that, I turned to Native American culture. Yes, I know that there isn't a single Native American culture, I mean the privileged white middle-class people who feel guilty about their privilege who turn to "indigenous peoples" believing they were all living in harmony with nature and each other all the time, and who infuse this idealized version of "Native American" into their environmentalist/hippie activism. This didn't have a particular accent to go with it, but it did influence my identity and my personality. I wore knee-high moccasins and made my own leather amulet (a bag worn around the neck with special items inside that had spiritual significance) and preached all the trendy environmentalist issues and fancied myself a storyteller of the old style, weaving tales of magic, mysticism, and morality through "traditional" fables and folklore.

Then, somewhere towards the end of my high school career, I got back in touch with the California Hick side. I worked on a horse ranch for a while, and I started listening to country music again (I gave that up in Jr. High, because cholas only listened to hip hop and dance pop, not country), and hung out with the blue-collar crowd, most of whom were not going to graduate high school, much to my mother's dismay. And the "ya'lls" came right on back and the gs went missing again.

Right after high school, and through college, I ended up working in customer service, sales, and I even did a stint as a tour guide for a historical landmark. All that public speaking wiped clean all the accents to the mostly-neutral accent that many of my friends are now familiar with. Then, switching majors to theatre, I spent a lot of time with theatre kids, who, for some reason, all really love British accents, so now I have a few random Brittish-slanted words, like "dunno" and "wot's that then?" mixed in among the "ya'lls".

Then, more recently, my exposure to Southern stagehands, who seem to be all redneck hicks and Puerto Ricans or Cubans, has brought back the Southern accent in full force, with a smattering of the old chola accent and Spanish words.  Anytime I've been at work for several days in a row will find me slipping back into those accents randomly even when not at work.  So my current accent is a mix of Southern, Spanish, British, and neutral Mid-Western/newscaster, with still a hint of Valley Girl.

So, for some reason, people, particularly the government, are all concerned with what country my ancestors happened to be born in. Those countries are Mexico, Scotland, England, Germany, and Sweden (I'm adopted, so I don't have the same ethnicity as the parents I mentioned earlier). But if you really want to know anything relevant about who I am as a person, the cultural influences who have made me who I am are Mexican-American, Vietnamese, Chinese, Philipino, Native American, Valley Girl, surfer, farmer, southern redneck, rancher, hippie-environmentalist, political activist, feminist - none of which are indicative of the cultures that spawned my great-grandparents, which is how far back you have to go to get my official "ethnic labels".

And now, I am learning Bollywood dancing, which is sure to influence me in the future. Westernized Hindi culture is another bizarre mix of traditional, patriarchal, stereotypical and the more modern egalitarian, strong female, democratic, capitalism cultures. Yet, although I have olive-toned skin and long dark hair, I have no Indian ethnicity in my heritage at all.

I'll say it again because it bears repeating - and the demographic takers ought to take note - where my several-times removed ancestors were born bears very little relevance on who I am as a person, either medically or personality-wise. Far more relevant is to ask what my cultural influences are, and those may have little-to-no relation to the geographic location in which I  or my parents were born. It's time to stop being concerned with categories of people that have no bearing on the important aspects of who they are and just start seeing us all as people. And even that, with the gradual blending of technology and medicine, will cease to be a relevant classification in time.

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I thought about making this an audio post, so ya'll could hear the various accents, but I don't have a paid account & the work-arounds are all way more complicated than I wanted to go through.  I don't want to take up any of my own server space with an audio file (and ya'll wouldn't like the lag time it takes to play it anyway), and any other free hosting account I have is video, like YouTube - and I didn't feel like putting together a video for all this.  Maybe I will someday.  But if you ever want to hear me speak in one of these accents, you can either ask me, or get me to start talking *about* something related, and it'll just slip out accidentally.  That's always amusing for my friends.  Also, the pictures are all linked to larger images, if you're interested.

Comments

[petite-lambda.livejournal.com]

That was a very interesting post! It resonated a lot with my as well (I have very little idea of y ethnicity, and I've lived in three very different countries and was influenced by many different cultures). I would love to hear you speak in all these accents -- hope you change your mind about that YouTube video!