Garlic and Bad Words

When I came home from school, as a child, the smell of garlic permeated the first floor of our house. The interior basement door would be open and I could hear something frying on the stove we had down there. Weird right that we had a stove in our basement. Well you see, my father's delicate american palate hates garlic and Portuguese food has a lot of garlic. My mother and her family

immigrated to America from Portugal back in the 60’s, you know when it was easier.  Growing up we lived with my grandmother, who did not speak much English. Although two languages were spoken in my childhood home I was only allowed to know one, English. This limited my communication with my grandmother, and I couldn’t understand when my mother was talking about family gossip. But worst of all I didn’t know any bad words in Portuguese.  

Although forsaking one's language and only speaking English is not a foreign concept, in America those who classify themselves as traditional american (they were born here, their parents were born here etc.) believe that if you migrate to america there are rules to follow. One rule is that you learn the language: English. But the U.S does not have an official language. Yet for those who classify themselves as a traditional American, they tend to have a certain level of anger when another language is spoken in their presence. 

Language is a part of one's cultural identity. It’s something that immigrants and children of immigrants grow up with, learning the language in order to communicate with relatives or just learning the traditional names for food and clothing and dances.  This was something I grew up wanting to learn, to be able to call my sibling a bad word and not get in trouble. Yet some people believe like in Migration Diasporas and Borders by Susan Stratford Friedman that “bilingualism and multilingualism are key markers of transit; of the refusal to assimilate completely ; and the insistence of retention of the past, other homes, and other cultural identities.” This idea of assimilation into american society is unfair. My mother became a citizen in her late teen years so she could vote in an upcoming election, she also changed her name as well and Americanized it. But her keeping her language in order to communicate with her mother is seen as a refusal to completely assimilate in american society. 

We as a society put up walls and boundaries. Separating us from them. We see this divide in race mostly but the idea of it just being about a person's skin color seems to be lacking. There is the divide in different cultures and identities. This binary divide is described in Diaspora, Border and Transnational Identities by Avtar Brah. Avtar Brahs’ article on identities and diaspora goes deep into racial binaries and how these binaries articulate power imbalances in society. But not only is race a division but so is Cultural Identity. Brah brings up one philosopher, Baliba, who describes this racism as not one of color but of “‘a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountably of cultural differences” That perhaps part of it is judging someone skin color but there is also the part of that person's culture that we judge. That their behavior, their dress, their food and language is too different from our own and therefore we must judge them and see them as inferior.  Or that they use just “too much garlic”.

While as a society we separate each other into different boxes. We could instead look at the similarities of our experiences. Moving from New England, which had a decent size population of Portuguese Americans, to Texas was difficult for my mother and I. We couldn’t find some of the food we were used to. And every person who asked my mom where she was from had no idea what a “Portuguese” was. She eventually gave up telling people where she was from and just said she was Italian. But talking to other students who were immigrants or their parents were immigrants made me feel more at home. The Latinx friends I made taught me their bad words and about their food and we bonded over those similarities. (It was later that I realized there were similarities in our experiences because my ancestors were colonizers and therefore they imposed their own culture and beliefs on the indigenous people in other countries. And committed several atrocities.  But as a child I didn’t really know that.)

This is an idea that Stuart Hall in Cultural Identity and Diaspora explains. When studying the people of the Caribbean they had a “shared culture”, though most were descendant of slaves and a lot of their culture was steeped in African tradition. Their culture was no longer African but had evolved into the Caribbean culture today. Hall goes on to say that “what [they] have become” is different then who their ancestors were. There was a sharing of cultures between different slaves of tribes and between different countries. Not all those who were forced to go to the Caribbean hundreds of years ago were from Africa some were from South Asia as well. The mixing of cultures created a new one for everyone to share and participate in. 

 I am an adult now and I have learned about the atrocities my ancestors created. I still use a lot of garlic and I now know bad words in multiple languages. But Cultural Identity should not “other” people, cultures are meant to be shared. Not taken and used for fashion trends or costumes. We should celebrate that we can have those kinds of ties to the past and see how sharing our Cultural Identity can evolve society.