Traditions that Misbehave - Part 2

As a forming adolescent, I built up my identity through a process, taking my cultural loyalty, bathing it in popular trends, and measuring it against the Anglo experience.  Unaware, of how often I was comparing myself, I took my class, my deficits, and especially my talents, measured them to peers.  I began to realize how my behavior shaped my actions.  This shaped my identities and attitudes.  I compared without accounting for the limited exposure I had to social advancements.  I'm arriving at the understanding that measuring doesn't need to happen.  I somberly feel the grief from prejudice and limits created by gaps revealed through measuring.  Comparing is futile. My little splash in the world cannot compare to the evolution of the accomplished colonial and metropolitan cultures.  My local New Mexico grown modest upbringing has to be its own experience, not a juxtaposition rather synthesis with progression.  Policy has to nourish this orientation, and policy appears to be driving it further into competition.

I feel more complemented by Anglo encounters than I do dejected.  The dejection is the result of the comparison.  I am not naively ignoring moments of prejudice, ethnic slants, or bigotry.  I think the realization that I don't have to be acceptable, qualified, or valid to some idealistic American identity, allows me to be more accepting, appreciative, and honored to have the modesty and simplicity of my barrio life.  A life that was often defenseless to the symptoms of poverty.  These symptoms usually are assigned as misbehaviors.  Some are disparaging, like burglary, drug dealing, violence, and delinquency.  Others are overlooked.  These are the most painful. These include the embedded self-doubt, academic aversion, and perceptions of cultural inferiority.  With these I can be an agency for change, then there are those that I cannot.

Between these less malicious byproducts of ethnic integration are the more aggressive misbehaviors.  I think my fear and pain balloon and accentuate the hurt from the more prominent consequences of Anglo migration.  The partiality of rules and laws that hide prejudice and bigotry are the most itchy.  The artful usage of political policy in ways that create enough ambiguity to conceal the ethnic convenience that favor the historic oppression that came with European colonialism.  Some policies that have a vague but in my opinion certain quality of prejudice are voting districts, law enforcement, welfare as promoted as handouts and hypocritically welfare disguised as subsidies, the commodification of education and health care, and taxation.  Each of these policies are expressed with a language that allows for interpretation that the privileged culture can evade a definite label or quality of discrimination.  These malicious strategies confuse the synthesis of cultures, because aspiration seems often too one directional, and that direction is intended to keep a power dynamic teetering towards the Anglo way.

I no longer aspire to be as functional as the Anglo culture can be perceived or might expect.  I see today that this direction and process lures me to see my traditions as misbehaving.  My traditions need to evolve and be refactored, so they become effective again.  My traditions no longer seem to shape and energize my culture.  Chicano traditions are not meant to be religious and repetitive experiences that symbolize an idea, but an exercise that cause me to experience the idea.  Traditional misbehavior is when I lose the responsibility for the idea and allow myself to focus on the ceremony of a tradition, knowing better, knowing the ceremony is ephemeral.  I see what a disservice it is to rely on traditions as way to deal with the grief of not being valued.  This traditional misbehavior results in too many spectators and the atrophy of investors.  The performance of the ceremony then replaces the effect of the tradition.

My lifestyle's culture is part tradition, morality, inferiority, tragedy, principle, faith, and love.  In society, community, nations, or other formal groups of people we have moralities that differ, and competing is a trend I hope to break in favor of collaboration.