Can I Appropriate My Own Culture?
Día de los Muertos has been a culturally important feature of my life for as long as I can remember. My first grade class wandered off to the neighboring cemetery to see the wreaths, photographs and stuffed animals people laid out on family graves. Afterward, I’d accompany my dad to take photos of them. Every year, my community center in Todos Santos, Mexico, had the biggest altar I’d ever seen, which stayed up long past the day itself because the people who’d built the huge, room-size display were that proud of it. ...
During my first two years at Oberlin, there was an altar in Stevenson Dining Hall next to the dessert table from Halloween until around Nov. 3. Laid out with unappetizing, stereotypical Mexican food, the altar had nothing to identify the person it was dedicated to, no personal belongings or photographs. I’m more superstitious than the average person, so maybe I reacted more strongly than another Mexican would. “They might as well lay out a random embalmed body. At least then the dead person would have an identity!” I complained. I didn’t go to Stevenson this week. I don’t think it was intentional, something just kept coming up between meals. But I didn’t see their latest supposedly “Latin American” menu or check for another empty altar. Some people — the Mexican government included — fear that Halloween will supplant Día de los Muertos. However, decades of American influence aside, every community finds someone to mourn, creating altars everywhere from restaurants to community centers.
...
Way back in 2012, I’d just been exposed to the idea of cultural appropriation, learning sociology from the internet. It was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I had a name for the discomfort that built in my chest when Americans were catrinas for Halloween or built altars for their dogs instead of people. On the other hand, I’d been told I was appropriating the culture in which I’d grown up. American conceptions of race said that whites couldn’t be Mexican, and that I was white and nothing else. I’m a dual citizen; the concept of me inherently betraying my patria by having ties to the colonizer nation — a serious accusation in a culture that has a word for those who fraternize with colonizers — wasn’t new. What was new was the angle: People older than me, smarter than me, with better English and more extensive academic backgrounds, were saying I was willfully hurting my own people. I wasn’t even the palest person in my grade, but I believed them when they said the American passport in my name meant that didn’t matter. I was so scared of hurting people. I withdrew from the festivities, and I didn’t talk about why. I haven’t been back home in almost two years. I try to make light of it. “White Mexican stranded in Oberlin” is a feature of my online bios. It’s not entirely a joke. I’ve gotten used to feeling alone and adrift. Oberlin has brutalized me the least of any place I’ve ever lived, but I miss living in a culture that made sense to me. I was going to do face paint this past Monday for the first time in three years. I agonized over the decision, afraid that because people read me as non-Hispanic white I was legitimizing appropriation of my own culture by putting it on display. I tried to steel my nerves. If someone tried to call me out, I could take them, I told myself. I made jokes on Facebook about putting my Mexican passport in my pocket and slapping anyone with it who claimed I had no right to my home, the one I left thousands of miles away. People from my high school liked the posts and made encouraging comments. But as long as people outside my culture make it a costume, I’m afraid to express it myself. What if people assume I’m one of those outsiders? What if the foreigners use me to justify their appropriation? I chickened out again. Maybe next year.
