At home, my grandfather often sings us old tango classics, my mother eats a spoonful of dulce de leche for dessert most nights and Spanish was my first language.
For these reasons and a million more, I am a Latina.
Granted, I have white skin and freckles. I am also Jewish and was born in southern California, thousands of miles from my parents’ native Argentina.
Like me, many students may remember walking around the Enormous Activities Fair their first week of college, anxious to pick up every interesting flyer, join every club’s mailing list and meet intriguing and relatable people.
Culturally-based student groups – organizations that revolve around a specific cultural identity – are a great place to start doing just that.
However, which organization is a Jewish, Argentinean, white-skinned, first-generation American girl supposed to join?
I remember walking up to a booth for a Latino student group, where girl handing out flyers warmly explained the group’s purpose and motives. She assured me they would gladly accept “white people” too.
It was not her assumption that bothered me – I am white-skinned, after all. But without question, I felt part of the out-group, sensing that I did not fit into the expected Latina identity. I thanked her and kept walking.
Defining oneself under an umbrella term, as cultural groups often do, can be helpful to create automatic kinship or a clear-cut community.
Group identifiers can also facilitate activism and provide legal rights, said Saeromi Kim, a Counseling and Psychological Services counselor in residence at the LGBT Resource Center.
But for a college student who intends to join a culturally-based group to gain a sense of belonging, these identifiers may only serve to isolate.
Despite the girl at the booth’s openness to my “whiteness,” I knew it could be difficult to gain that sense of cultural belonging when I appeared so inherently separate or fundamentally different from traditional conceptions of “Latin culture.”
At that point, my Spanish language, rambunctious family and my iTunes collection of Latin music were altogether irrelevant. And even though I participate in Jewish student groups – which represent another significant aspect of my identity – a part of me was still left unexpressed.
Farhan Mithani, a second-year physiological sciences student and member of the UCLA Mixed Student Union, has both Pakistani and Burmese backgrounds. He described himself as “ambiguous-looking.”
In high school, Mithani said he felt neither his white friends nor his Pakistani friends quite understood him. As a freshman at UCLA, he joined the Pakistani Students Association in the hopes of meeting new people. While he said the members of the group were welcoming, his light skin and unique cultural background set him apart.
Mithani soon found the Mixed Student Union at UCLA, which focuses on the specific struggles and experiences of students with mixed identities.
“We are motivated to learn more about each (of our cultures) and accept them both, rather than be subjected to just one,” Mithani said.
Of course, we often have a stronger association with one particular characteristic of our identity. This naturally extends to culturally-based groups, which attract students with similarly strong associations.
Many such groups serve as safe havens or social hubs for students of particularly strong identifiers. At the same time, culturally-based student groups should work to emphasize the prevalence and the value of the diversity within their own groups.
In this way, the pressure on students to stratify or separate their many elements, as Mithani once felt, would diminish. After all, learning about one’s identity should be a holistic and fluid process.
Clearly acknowledging and discussing these kinds of complexities could attract a wider variety of students to cultural organizations.
John Le, a fourth-year psychobiology student and culture coordinator of the Vietnamese Student Union, said that within the Vietnamese Student Union, there exists a rift between traditionally conservative Vietnamese and more Westernized Vietnamese-American cultures.
These differences create an opportunity for critical dialogue when examining identity issues such as gender and sexuality and the Western idea of “coming out to your family,” Le said.
Cultural groups could become better springboards for students to delve deeper within themselves, moving beyond their principal ethnic or racial identity and into the way their many identities interact and complement each other.
Walking around the Enormous Activities Fair, I did not necessarily want to join a group and adopt a singular framework of what it “means” to be a “fill in the blank.” Instead, I wanted to find a dynamic space. A place where I could relate to those who share a primary identity, but discuss the multiplicity of all our other identities.
Identity and culture should not be hegemonic. Here at UCLA, we create the student groups and we have the power to shape and mold our collective identities without bending to stereotypes, stigmas or assumptions. In that way, we can acknowledge and embrace the thousands of diverse and colorful individuals here at UCLA.
Email Ferdman at mferdman@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to opinion@media.ucla.edu or tweet us @DBOpinion.