Reflection

     

Reflection 

    For my portfolio, I ended up including a book review, a recipe, and an interview. These items suited my skills a bit better than the visual art idea I had originally chosen, which did not come to fruition to my satisfaction.  However, the items I chose were ones that brought me a lot of joy since two of them, the recipe and the interview, directly involved connecting with my family. Plus, I've always loved cooking and baking. Even the book review helped facilitate conversations in our home. We sat in the yard the other night and I read some to my mom, my sister, and my partner Mars. Mars is from Mexico so we were able to compare their experience with these stories with ours and share in one another's culture. Which then segued into how they have experienced racism vs. how we have, and our immigration stories. Then my mom started telling us other stories she grew up hearing and I don't think I can replicate that feeling of togetherness.

    Of all of the three items, I think I like the interview the most. I had fun making my website for the recipe too but the interview with my mom has immortalized that conversation. It has inspired me to record more of our conversations as well, at least for posterity's sake. She has a lot of stories and I’ve heard a lot of them but she tells them just right and if I don’t record them, then one day I’ll never get to hear them again. My mom was really touched that I wanted to interview her too, so it’s more special to think that I made her feel heard and valued. 

    The most challenging part, other than time management, was starting that art project and messing it up. I had an image in my mind of how it would turn out and it just didn't pan out so that was disappointing. It served as good kindling when we went camping instead... However, I will try again another day, just for my own personal growth rather than for school. Not to mention getting started on it and figuring out just how much I was comfortable unloading and feeling. I mean, we have not been back to Paraguay in over a decade so I know that things there have changed a whole lot and the culture that I have is like a vacuum version of what it really is. A version of Paraguayan culture that has frozen in time with us and traveled here, only to be stored in our mental closets and recalled now and again with nostalgia. 

    Over the course of creating and assembling this portfolio, I learned that we have constructed our identities through our experiences, and those are connected to the constructs of race and ethnicity that we happened to fall into. I learned, that the identity I had before I moved to the U.S. is completely different than the one I have now. It is a shadow of that raw culture I lived day to day, and something to be sprinkled in to remind me where we came from rather than who I am. I am Hispanic but I am also part of the subcultures I partake in now. I have a smaller community in my ethnicity than the community I have with the LGBT community, for example. That’s not to say they are not all valid pieces of my identity. I also learned that it’s not so much about what practices and traditions make up one's specific culture, but rather the meaning you chose to give it and the people that you partake in them with. It's sentimental, but honestly it's the message I heard loudest.