Minor-Practice

The image is of Nossa Senhora de Fátima, sometimes seen as the Virgin Mary. This religious object tells a bit about my Catholic upbringing. Always by my bedside table to this day, it is very common to have her image in miniature version in our rooms. This is a more detailed version including “so tress pastorinhos”, the three pastor children. The story goes that Mary appeared in front of the three children in Fatima (land located in Portugal) on the 13th of May. When I lived in Portugal I remember going on road trips with the family to this city as it grew into a sanctuary. Later when my family immigrated to Brazil, coincidentally in our neighbourhood, a replica of a chapel of Fatima was being built. I remember the construction days and being in that mud with my parents to pray. It felt like a bridge of my two realities, Portugal and Brazil. She is very important to my family also because of the number 13. History goes that it’s my family’s lucky number as many things are tied to it (my grandmas house, my brothers and I's birthday, and so on).

WEEK 39

A) Document an object that tells a story about your cultural or family history. You can choose to document it visually via photography, drawing, video or audio.

B) Document the same object in writing. It can be an anecdote, (family) memory, historical
research or a combination of all.

-Document A) and B) Hotglue before next week's lesson.

WEEK 40

a. Generate new individual content based on the collectively chosen keyword/category: It can be from personal documents, family documents, cultural documents, school documents, marginalized history, fabricated, speculative etc.

Write a few lines of your interpretation of the collective keyword, collect in a file/mood board and upload to the Students work folder on Teams.

b. Read Decolonial Listening (2019) by Rolando Vazquez (in Group 2>>Files)

CULTURAL DIVERSITY MINOR - CULTURAL DIVERSITY MINOR - CULTURAL DIVERSITY MINOR - CULTURAL DIVERSITY MINOR - CULTURAL DIVERSITY

1- What does invisibility & silence mean for your group?
2- How do you feel colonialism closest in your life?
3- How to look/hear/feel for what isn't said/seen/felt?

1- Silence from one part of the family makes it hard to know yourself/history.
- Part of your identity isn't seen by other side of your family
- If you are not performing all your cultures your identity can be invisible
- do you silence part of your identity depending on your space? Which culture is being silenced and when?
- You become invisible in your own life as you try to see/create your own identity whilst feeling you have no ownership over all your cultures.

2- Colonialism is still happening it just doesnt look the same.
-Lived in Portugal (colonizer) and Brazil (Colony) and saw its direct impact
-Moving back to Europe with those eyes
-Linguistics
-British Education
- Quarto de empregada

3- Go into the silence of family
- Go back into the past to heal from trauma, to heal & understand yourself.
- Find community

then who could be? Who could claim the sole right or way to an identity? - Author: Tanuja Desai Hidier

A bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing - Author: Jhumpa Lahiri

fluctuating between those identities.

Adolescence is a time when awareness of identities and belonging increases. Identities are the meanings that individuals acquire through social interactions and as such are crucial to understanding a person’s sense of himself or herself (McCall & Simmons, 1966; Stryker, 1980).

Gloria Wekker says, ‘the cultural archive is located in many things, in the way we think, do things, and look at the world, in what we find (sexually) attractive, in how our affective and rational economies are organized and intertwined. Most important, it is between our ears and in our hearts and souls (p.33)’

The lost, the lonely, the bicultural misfits with a foot in two worlds and a place in neither. - Author: Don Winslow

I'm bicultural, and everyone sees me as a Latina, but in my head I see myself as both Latina and American. — Genesis Rodriguez

I think I'm representing a new generation of Latinos - bilingual, bicultural people. — Genesis Rodriguez

https://theconversation.com/what-being-stuck-between-two-cultures-can-do-to-a-persons-psyche-80448

‘If my identity is shaped throughout the way others perceive me, in what what ways is my identity and existence mine?’ - Faou Biera, 2020

“When I was young, my parents took our family to Haiti during the summers. For them, it was a homecoming. For my brothers and me it was an adventure, sometimes a chore , and always a necessary education on privilege and the grace of an American passport.” -Peculiar benefits Bad Feminism.

Looking at identity crises and our sense of belonging through
self-navigation.

How do we navigate/switch in different environments
How do I come to view myself?
How do I describe myself to others?
How do i identify?
Where do we belong?
Do I pick just one culture?

keywords:
BICULTURALISM
GENERATIONAL TRAUMA
CULTURAL DETACHMENT
UNSTABLE WITNESS
THIRD CULTURE KID
IDENTITY CRISIS
PERFORMATIVE CODE-SWITCH

Short background on me:
Grandparents immigrated to Brazil from Portugal and Italy.
Parents immigrated to Portugal from Brazil.
My brother and I, born and raised in Portugal, immigrated to Brazil.
I moved as an expat to The Netherlands, two years later my brother also moved here.
Great Grandparents were also immigrants and so my family's history is of immigration.

I've felt lost most of my life. Sometimes I feel closer to figuring it out. But something reminds me I haven't. I feel safer claiming my culture when away from it. So I'm not in constant comparison with something/someone more “real”, the well known Imposter syndrome.

Asking somebody where they are from is not necessarily inherently negative. However, it can be a question that brings waves of anxiety that ripple into our deeper sense of identity when the answer is not clear.

My response to the infamous “Where are you from?” Used to be a calculated list, ranking my 3 nationalities in order of my belonging “Brazilian, Portuguese and Italian.” To which I could feel people's eyes rolling in dissatisfaction as I came across as conceited. My answer later became “there’s a short version and long version…” to which curiously people would want to know the longer version… only to then reject two of them. With time I figured it was easier to adopt one nationality than to have others tell me who I was not. I stifled parts of myself in that process, simply for the sake of having a quicker answer that with time detached me from my other cultures. This arose another issue, I was almost setting myself up for failure as I now had to perform this authentic representation of what it meant to be (insert one of three nationalities here). However, navigating that question whilst aware of stereotypes has its undeniable privileges. I can choose what people see which benefited me when applying for universities in The Netherlands and Housing, as I hold an Italian EU passport.

All 4 generations of my family are 1st generation immigrants. My grandparents moved from Portugal and Italy to Brazil where my parents were born. where he andLater in life my parents immigrated, whilst pregnant with my brother Lucas, to Portugal I were born. I was 10 years old when we then immigrated to Brazil. It happened in stages, Lucas was there for 10 months before my mother and I joined, and lastly my father 8 months after us. It was the first time we were separated from each other, a family that seemed to only have each other. It was the first biggest change my life would go through, to a country that wasn’t unknown as we visited often, however, it wasn’t home and it wasn’t vacation. When I turned 19 I moved to The Netherlands now with the privilege of being an expat. This was the second time I faced extensive culture shock. Echoing our past, Lucas moved here 2 years after me and we now wait for my parents to move back to Europe so we can be reunited again.

portugues grandparents immigrant stamped passport

parents airport picture immigrating to Portugal

me immigrating to Brazil

I believe there is something to be said about the intergenerational trauma of my immigrant family. Doing this self-navigation exercise has allowed me to further understand how I was raised. The experiences my parents went through during their move to Portugal, I couldn’t conceptualise as a child. I now understand that they were struggling with their own sense of belonging. Beginning this cycle of fixating on the possibilities the other continent held, expecting too much and only getting disappointed. In the attempt to not distance themselves from their culture, they raised Lucas and I as Brazilians in Portugal. At times with an excessive showing of patriotism enabled by football culture, I believe to also have been a mechanism against the microaggressions towards Brazilians, an ex-colony of Portugal. Having that said, my arrival in Brazil had me continuing my fathers cycle. As I became obsessed with returning to Portugal, later being confronted with the ways I could not identify as Brazilian. With each year it seemed less and less likely that I would return and the Portuguese part of me began to fade as I integrated in Brazil.

(Celebrating with family and friend when Brazil won the World Cup in 2002)

my mothers "festa de 15 anos" brazilian celebration of a womans coming of age. Similar to a sweet 16 party

I protested having my own "festa de 15 anos". didnt wants something so extravagnat and femenin and... I did not feel Brazilian enough to have one of my own like my classmates.

8 years had passed and I was for the first time visiting Portugal. There was this Emotional and sensory archive on location and atmosphere I was accessing again. The idea of this archive can also be seen in the 2015 documentary “Reunification” by Alvin Tsang. When he visits his home in China with his sister, they reflect on what feels familiar after their immigration to the USA. In addition to this type of archiving, another way I would navigate my cultural identities was with governmental archiving of legal documents. I owned an Italian passport and a Brazilian, which provided me some comfort in belonging. Therefore this trip was also an opportunity to make some sort of Portuguese identification. What I had to show for as my claim to Portugal was a small fading birth certificate that was not being recognised by any of the public workers or government system. I will never forget having to hold back my tears in utter defeat. Alas I secured my Portuguese identification and it felt as if I proved all the people who denied my Portuguese heritage wrong. I now live in The Netherlands where I introduce myself as Brazilian and use my Portuguese ID in a country I entered with an Italian passport.

As a group, we made a manifesto to express ourself during this self-navigation journey. Our idea was to publish parts of the process with clothing. I really wanted to creat something that I could weat and utilize outsied of the bounedries of this assignment. This was the first clothing piece i would made and wante to be proud of it. Mostly i wanted to be proud or who i was and embody my multiculturalism. My sentance for the manifesto is "I WILL NOT SUCCUMB TO THE IDENTITY OTHERS PERCIVE ME AS". we screen printed the manifesto and I stiched it. We had no acsess to the school for most of this project so most of the work was organized an hosted at my house, bringing a sense of collaboration to an otherwise very individual project.