Creative-Critical Reflections Part 2

Trabado entre dos aguas, abajo dos cielos cuyo estrellas enumeran entre uno o cincuenta

    As a Cuban immigrant who came to this country at a very young age, I’ve had a shifting relationship with my cultural identity. When I was very young I never really thought about it:  my home was as close to Cuba as you could get, sans a plane ticket. We only spoke Spanish, ate Cuban food, hung out with Cuban relatives, etc.  But as I got older, and started going to school, and started spending more time outside of my home; as well as consuming more U.S. media, I started thinking of myself as less and less Cuban. I started developing a distinct identity from that of my parents. I didn’t share their memories, their cultural references, I didn’t know the family members in their stories -- I started to think of myself as, “not really Cuban.” At school, my identity was never really an issue: I grew up in Miami where 70% of the population is Hispanic/Latine. If you/your family weren’t from somewhere else, you were the weird kid. So most of the kids I went to school with were mostly first to third-generation Americans, so I never felt alienated for being an immigrant. And since I came to the U.S. at 4 years old, I learned English rather quickly, and never had any language barriers at school (not any that I remember). In fact, when I first started elementary school the administration tried to put me in ESOL, but quickly learned that I spoke English well enough to be in regular classes. As for my parents, thankfully most of my teachers also spoke Spanish, so communication was never really an issue. Though, by the end of middle school I had stopped asking them to come to things like open house since I knew how busy they were with work; I just felt bad having them come to school at 6 p.m. just to hear teachers do the whole open house spiel in a language they didn't understand. 

    By this time I felt like I had completely assimilated to American culture, especially when compared to more recent arrivals, or to older immigrants like my parents. Even when I compared myself to second-gen. kids that were able to regularly visit Cuba, I felt pretty white-washed. My parents always praised me for how well I spoke English and how well I assimilated to the culture, “Ese sí es Americano;” and my education never really gave me the opportunity to connect or learn about where I’m from. It wasn’t until I came to MICA that I was able to see how, no matter what I thought in middle school, I didn’t perfectly fit the hegemonic ideal of whiteness. So while this was personally challenging for me, for most of my academic career, it never really affected my school work: I was pretty lucky to grow up in a majority Hispanic/Latine city where a white, Cuban, immigrant is pretty fucking normal. That was the case until late-highschool, where, through art, I started thinking about my relationship to Cuba, my parents, and started really pushing back against this white-washing of myself; something I’m still in the process of even now in college. 

 

   My Family, 12/24/2004

Two Tools for Teachers:

I think to promote and celebrate diversity in your classroom, you have to show diversity in the curriculum. Break away from the canonized view of art, how it’s made and the forms it takes, and focus on artists and artistic traditions from a variety of places and time periods: Jacob Lawrence, August Savage, Wilfredo Lam, Nam June Paik, Frida Kahlo, Beatriz González, Yayoi Kusama, etc.  Students may be reluctant to share their uniqueness, because they see that uniqueness as deviance: that to be an artist and to make art you have to be a certain type/way, and that their uniqueness is a hindrance to that. By broadening the curriculum and exposing students to a variety of artist and art-making practices, students will see that there is no one way to be an artist and that their uniqueness is key to forging their unique artistic voice.

Another way to celebrate diversity, is to celebrate the diversity already sitting in your classroom. Have your students investigate their heritage (interviewing family, tribal elders -- keepers of knowledge in their community) and teach the class an artistic practice from their culture: written, musical, craft, dance, etc. You could make it a big end of the semester project, with like a proposal, and a written component if that’s your style. The key is to have kids investigate their heritage, and to show them that their unique cultural knowledge is worthwhile and as important as what a teacher presents