Chicano Culture and Loss of Cultural Identity

Your essay presents perhaps one of the oldest and most questioned debated that we encounter as we attempt to grow and live our lives. The central question, of course, being in how we are able to grow wings yet keep our roots. In short, it is incredibly difficult to move ahead in the world without at least partially, or sometimes totally, abandoning our past and where we come from. However, perhaps this speaks directly to class and the manner and way in which we often tend to organize ourselves. Sometimes, it seems as if we are told and drilled from birth that we simply cannot be happy with who we are, that being content or satisfied is not enough, and that we must strive to move beyond what we know, becoming something which is better and greater, at least in the perspective of the majority of the world.

However, the entire time that we engage in such a quest, perhaps we often tend to lose just as much as we eventually find. After all, although not everyone manages to raise their status in the world, their exist a significant number that does indeed succeed in at least partially moving beyond the social class they are born in to, or, at the very least, making more money than they had originally expected to. However, while we seek bigger paychecks and more powerful friends, we often tend to forget that there can be a heavy price to pay for wanting to move ahead in the world, and that price is the things that we are unable to carry with us as we walk the long path towards what we perceive to be improvement.

Perhaps this story makes the point perfectly clear that it can be very hard to maintain the person that we believed ourselves to be in the past at the same time that we attempt to redefine and change certain parts of either ourselves or our personalities and abilities in order to better improve our chances of becoming the person that we wish to be. This point is also equally true in terms of culture. It often seems as though the quest for improvement can become a quest for sameness and uniformity, in this eventual and constant uniformity, we must leave behind that which makes us unique, or that which seems to take us away from the all consuming need of improvement. Truly, it is a sad idea that we must often leave parts of ourselves behind.

Must this always be the case though? Is it simply a fact that we need to leave parts of ourselves behind? Of course, this mainly lies in the strength of the individual, and whether that individual person is able to retain their own culture and identity. We do not necessarily have to give up our personalities and cultural identities to move up in the world, it just sometimes dictates that we must take them on a more personal level. We should never, never, be forced to give up who we are, we must instead fight for what makes us unique, and learn to adapt and flourish, taking our personalities and our own unique aspects of personality with us. It would indeed be a boring world if the only option for success was to force a person to abandon who they are and what they feel is right.