Cultural Identification

Sometimes I feel I experience my life as a pendulum of extremes, and never more so than when I think about my heritage.

When we first moved to California, I was struck by the feeling that I did not have a culture, particularly as I compared myself to my Mexican-American, African-American, and Chinese-American friends. Shoot - even many of my Caucasian friends had a rich Dutch tradition running through their family tree. But what did I have? I thought of myself as coming from a small Everytown in Middle America with no distinguishing qualities. No cool traditions, no fascinating legacies, not even a church doctrine steeped in history. But in the five years that I've been exposed to lectures on diversity, small group discussions surrounding diversity, and heated arguments regarding diversity, I've come to realize that, my oh my, do I come from a very specific kind of culture. A few of them, in fact.

Starting with my parents' experiences of Appalachian culture nestled in and around the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and moving on to the region of the Ozarks where I grew up (with a sprinkle of Kentucky Blue Grass exposure in between), I've come to realize how different my background is from many of my friends. And I've become more aware of the love/hate relationship I have with those distinct factors that have made me who I am. And therein lies the tension between romanticizing my history and feeling ashamed of it.

My parents come from an area of the country that is readily associated with the Beverly Hillbillies and Deliverance, with poverty-struck, barefoot mountain folk that the world forgot and let be, secluded in the mountains with their ignorance, bigotry, and mishmash of Irish, Scottish, German, and Native American influences and folklore. But this is also the world of the Walton's, of honest, hardworking people who are fiercely independent and proud. (M. Gladwell has a fascinating chapter in Outliers about cultural legacy that you can read about here, and David Hackett Fischer's book Albion's Seed provides insight into social inheritance via accents; i.e. the original settlers in Appalachia said hard for hired, critter for creature, sartin for certain, he-it for hit, far for fire, nekkid for naked, winder for window, poosh for push, and many others).

I was raised outside of a town with a population of 2,000 people. I went to school with kids whose parents had the same teachers that we did. We never locked our doors and were patrons of the Gas, Guns, and Groceries store about a mile from our house. The cool thing to do on the weekend when you were in high school was drink beer and drive out to the Spook Light. I got married when I was 21 and people commented about how long we had waited. This area, in my opinion, is one of the most beautiful parts of our country. It is also often referred to as the Meth capital of the country. Even now, I have to read this through others' eyes to see how different my "normal" is from how many people grew up.

Last week a film review caught my eye about a recent Sundance Best Picture and Best Screenplay winner.  The story takes place in Missouri and the plot evolves around "an unflinching Ozark Mountain girl [who] hacks through dangerous social terrain as she hunts down her drug-dealing father while trying to keep her family intact." I looked up the trailer to see how much would resonate with me and within the first 15 seconds saw a shot of a log cabin with kids jumping on a trampoline in the yard. Hmmm....check....check. Even if that's where the similarities between this story and my story might end, now I'm really curious to see the movie.



When I was seven years old I moved from Kentucky to Missouri. I quickly learned that I spoke very differently from my new friends, and I was embarrassed by my accent. Over twenty years later I now mourn the loss of that piece of me. I hope I continue wrestling with both sides of the coin of my heritage - the positive and the negative. I don't want to take for granted something that I might some day lose. But why is it so hard to hold both the good and bad of things? Not to mention the good and bad of people...but that's another blog for another day.

For now, I'll leave you with the words of Alan Jackson:

Where I come from, it's corn bread and chicken

Where I come from, a lot of front porch pickin'

Where I come from, tryin' to make a livin'

Workin' hard to get to heaven, where I come from

Do you know where you come from?