Cultural Reporter Blog 3

In the United States today, one of the most talked about issues is the increasing number of Hispanic Americans.  As a matter of fact, this group is the fastest growing minority group in our country.  It often seems like everywhere we go, signs, books, and instructions are displayed in both english and spanish.  While most Americans have trouble adapting to the constant presence of the Spanish language and many native spanish speakers have trouble reading the english, how do the children of these immigrants get by?  How do they chose whether to embrace American culture, Spanish culture, or a combination of the two?  As I interviewed a Mexican-American family, the Mezas, I kept these questions in mind and tried to bring light to some of these issues.

As I collected data, I conducted two separate interviews.  The first interview was with a member of my group of interest, 8 year old Valentín Meza Jr.  After talking to Valentín I invited his parents over for some BBQ and had a much more laid back, conversational interview.  One of the biggest questions that I had for young Valentín was whether he identified himself as an American, a Mexican, or multicultural.  As I asked him questions I quickly found out that he was strongly multicultural.  Valentín is only eight years old, but has an extremely strong sense of who he is and where he comes from.  I found that this is common among young multicultural children, and only about 3% of children label themselves incorrectly (Baum).  He explained to me that he was Mexican and that he liked soccer and that his family celebrated Mexican holidays, but he also really liked american football.  I asked him if a lot of his friends were Mexican Americans and his response was interesting.  He acknowledged that many of his friends were Mexican Americans, but did so in a very nonchalant manner with a shrug of his shoulders.  He seemed to really not care whether his friends were from similar cultural backgrounds to him or not.  I asked him if his friends understood his Mexican traditional activities that he participated in, and he responded that sometimes they didn’t, but he would always try to teach them what it was about.  Valentin showed a very strong pride for both his Mexican roots and his American surroundings.  As I researched whether Valentin’s attitude was common amongst Mexican Americans, I soon found a recent study conducted at Brown University that backed up my findings.  The study found that the stronger a child’s sense of ethnic identity was, the more that child desired socialization with not only similar children, but also those of different ethnic backgrounds (Baum).  Valentin acts as the epitome of a cultural broker.  I think that a big part of Valentin’s attitude is that there is a very strong presence of Mexican Americans in the United States.  Valentin has the opportunity to be proud of being bicultural because there are many others like him, so he doesn’t feel “stuck in the middle” like many multicultural people do.

Another topic that I found very interesting was Valentin’s use of code switching.  Being a spanish minor, I often try to speak spanish with Valentin.  However, he absolutely refuses to speak spanish back to me, and will respond to whatever I said in english angrily.  I asked him why he did not like to speak Spanish with me and his response was surprisingly lucid for an 8 year old.  He said that he knew I spoke english better than spanish, and that he just thought that we could have better conversations in english.  I had initially thought that he had chosen to only speak english to me in an attempt to alienate me from his spanish culture, or that it was because he was embarassed of his ethnic background.  In reality, he was just trying to cultivate the most effective mode of communication which is one of the main reasons that many people code switch (Thompson).  This also just goes to show how Valentin has acted as a cultural broker.

Baum, D. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2007/09/ethnic-identity

Martin, J.N., & Nakayama, T.K. (2013). Intercultural Communication in Contexts (6th ed.) New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

Thompson, M. (n.d.). Five Reasons Why People Code-Switch. NPR. Retrieved December 4, 2013, from http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/04/13/177126294/five-reasons-why-people-code-switch