How often did I hear her say, “embrace your culture, love our language, take pride in our heritage.” My father has a softer touch. My mother, Reyna, raised us wild, free, and unapologetically Mexican. When a person, or a family, is removed from these daily interactions, it is easy for one to believe that nothing has changed within their old community thus giving these families a defined, almost tangible ideal that they use to survive. Culture is a social construct that is rewritten and reinforced day by day. It is this “nostalgic sentiment” that drives immigrant families to center their lives around concrete cultural aspects that actually change on a daily basis. For people who live abroad or away from what they consider their “home culture”, the idea of “homeland” becomes an important nucleus for nostalgic sentiment” (205). I will demonstrate that my family adhered to a form of “frozen culture” as an excessive way to oppose globalization and cosmopolitanism.“As the local becomes less significant physically, the memory and the imagination of that place become stronger. In this blog, I intend to cover the impact that food and music has on my family and how it shaped my perception of our culture. My experience pertains to a myriad of contributing factors that are in actuality experienced by anyone feeling diasporic discontent. By studying the “complex links between culture, motherhood, family dynamics, food consumption, identity and loss,” (As Mother Made It, 196) I have come to realize that my experience as a first generation Mexican-American woman was heavily influenced by factors more complex than cultural heritage.
With wild abandon, I dig my grubby little hands in and mix it all up with my fingers before spooning it into my mouth. I watch gleefully as he squeezes in half a lime and adds a pinch of salt. My earliest memory is of my father, Jose Antonio, humming as he placed the beans and rice that my grandmother, Crisanta, made into a small, blue bowl the divide between the two in almost a perfect line.
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