JE#3

Cultural Schizophrenia means battling with yourself on a daily basis. From the way I walk, to the way I talk, the way I write, the way I dress, everything I do is heavily influenced by my surroundings. I personally enjoy admiration and acceptance from others, so I subconsciously change my way of being for the people I am with. I understand schizophrenia as a mental condition that makes it hard for a person to distinguish fantasy from reality, and a constant internal fight with voices no one else can hear. Multiple personalities are also a key component of this mental condition. Therefore, cultural schizophrenia for me translates into my inability to gauge where I belong in society, as well as adopting several personalities for societal acceptance. When drawing out my identity wheel I realized I have several personalities that disconnect and in turn cause a daily identity crisis for me. For instance, my Mexican heritage implies that I speak Spanish fluently, but my dominant tongue is English because my parents knew that in order to be successful in this country I had to speak English fluently. Although I can read, write, and completely understand Spanish, my comfort level in speaking it publicly is very low. Since I grew up rewarded to speak English without a Spanish accent and did not practice my Spanish because my father wanted to practice his English, my Spanish speaking family from Mexico ridiculed me and often thought of me as “creido.” Yet my brownness in the classroom was always prevalent. I was the “good, for a Mexican” student and constantly had to prove myself worthy to my privileged Asian and White counterparts. So fitting in with my peers was a struggle because I was either too brown or not brown enough. My anxiety stemmed from the myth that I had to choose a side. Up until recent chapters of my life, I often sided with the dominant culture because it seemed the most rewarding and promising. Shockingly, my choices in dress, language, even social activities were positively reinforced by my parents because I was “off to bigger and better things” in comparison to other Mexican children. Essentially, my parents were also colonized to believe that my preferences (caused by internalized racism) were precursor signs to a successful child who is successfully navigating the system, and that I did. I got into UCLA, but my education here is not what I nor what my family expected. Here I continually realize there is a huge disconnect between the way I view myself, and the way others view me. Since I learned to “coexist” with privileged individuals throughout my k-12 experience, the tension between radical Chican@s and the “White Person” is uncomfortable for me at times since I can understand both ends of the spectrum. Sometimes my music and dining preferences side more towards privileged white culture, but my ideology resides in critical race theory. This is most often seen through my experiences as a contemporary dancer. Dance is a SUPER privileged activity because of the expensive lifestyle it demands (studio fees, costumes, transportation, certain diets, etc). Dance essentially equalizes me and my dance peers based on technical ability, but my experiences outside the studio differ from the other dancers who have moms drinking lattes waiting for their children to end class. Navigating these spaces that favor opposite ends of the spectrum as someone who lives in the middle of the spectrum, is a very uncomfortable. Language and choice of hobby are only two of the several avenues that inconveniently cross daily, with me having to choose a path for sake of comfort and appearing “found”. In this society, it is not ok to be lost, which is why it makes me anxious to answer “What do you identify as?”