Blast from the past

[ciroccoj]

Came across some old floppy disks and am going through them seeing what's still viewable and what's been too digitally degraded to save. Stumbled across my "*&%$ you and your little dog too" letter to a couple of my Chilean relatives from eleven years ago. Wow, was I pissed. I suddenly remember why I've never gone back to Chile, despite having many other kind and wonderful relatives there, whom I would dearly love to see.


I always thought I'd raise my boys to be proud of - or at least aware of - their Chilean heritage. Lost heart after our one visit with Daniel back in 1998; stopped speaking to him in Spanish, played far less Chilean music, and didn't bother to give Justin a Spanish-friendly name, or register him as a Chilean citizen. I've taught both kids some Spanish, but on the whole they have almost no connection to that part of their heritage at all. Which I now figure is not all that weird; I left the country when I was four, and only went back for brief visits every few years. My mother didn't raise me "Chilean," whatever that means in terms of culture/religion/child rearing practices/morals. I don't even understand the slang or cultural references spoken by my generation. So really, except for a few of my relatives and friends and some childhood memories, I don't have much of a connection to the place either.

Comments

[a-dawn.livejournal.com]

It never ceases to amaze me just how quickly culture can be . . . not lost . . .but that's the only word I can think of. In just over a generation. Mind boggling.

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, lost is the right word, I'd say. I never thought I'd be part of the process. But it's one of those things where you kind of look at the situation and ask yourself, What am I striving to keep? For me, being Chilean meant the Spanish language, dropped-s's included; a history of diaspora after Pinochet; songs from the sixties that talked about revolution and poverty and power and justice; various foods that my mother cooked; the Chilean expats I grew up with in Ottawa...

Since my mother's death, I have nobody to speak Spanish with, and the dialects of other Latinos often leave me confused. Even the Spanish spoken by Chileans today is foreign to me; picture trying to understand people talking about Epic Fail and saying D'oh! and My bad when your slang consists of "groovy" and "can you dig it?" and you don't know what to call the interwebs or DVDs. The diaspora mostly returned to Chile after 17 years of exile. The songs that I learned are as familiar to modern Chileans as Hey Jude, Quarter to Three, and Pinball Wizard. Ideas of revolution or social justice are very passe, apparently. My mom didn't cook a lot of Chilean food in the last few years she was alive, since she lived with a Franco-Ontarian and had Canadian grandkids. Besides, there's a lot of beef in there. Most of the Chilean expats I grew up with went back to Chile, or were friends of my mother's, whom I lost touch with after her death.

The culture itself apparently (I'm told) prides itself on devotion to family - extended family, that is - with people respecting their elders (as in, obeying them) until they die. Chilean men are Men, not househusbands who actually, you know, do dishes and take care of their kids. Chilean women are real women, who actually care about their appearance and wear makeup and heels to the grocery store and don't try to be men. The Church is not all-important, but everyone belongs to it and goes on important days like weddings and funerals and Christmas.

Um... as a person who was treated like a capable, independent adult by her mother since age 17 or so, who's married to a former househusband who can in fact do the bloody dishes and still feel like a man, as a woman who only wears heels and makeup if it's required by her job, and doesn't think of herself as a pseudo-man for doing so, as an atheist... I eventually had to ask myself what connection I actually had. And found to my dismay that the answer was, not a hell of a lot :(