Celebrating Identity Sun, 25th August, 2013
This weekend already has been a multicultural experience for my family and me. It began Friday night with treating ourselves to a Japanese dinner, with colorful sights, smells, flavors and textures.
And this continued into Saturday as Betsy and I enjoyed the Festival of Nations in Tower Grove Park (still on today, by the way, so it's not too late to enjoy it yourself if you're in St. Louis). Just like it is every year, the gathering was filled with sensory delights from every direction. It was harder than ever to choose which foods to sample—we tried Bulgarian this time. Last year was Ethiopian.
But the real focus of our afternoon was the main stage, where performers from all over the globe and here in St. Louis joined together to celebrate cultural heritage. Betsy has been learning Hula with a local group devoted to Hawaiian and Polynesian dance, and we watched the more experienced dancers performing for the crowd. While it's pleasurable to watch, the casual observer cannot fully grasp the underlying meaning of what the graceful hand motions, footwork and colorful costumes truly mean culturally. They are a set of unique customs that belong to a particular time and place in the world and we can only fully grasp the meaning if we immerse ourselves in study and practice.
Next it was the Mexican folk dancing group from Chicago. As I watched the bright colors, broad-brimmed hats and ornate twirling skirts, I was struck by how fluid these cultural practices and artifacts can be as human cultures blend and adapt. You could see clear influences from the original culture of the indigenous pre-colonial people, then with Spanish and some African influences layered on top. And the most striking thing was seeing how a lot of our own "American" culture, at least that in the Southwestern US, is actually Mexican/Spanish, including the cowboy hats and fringed buckskin jackets.
And believe it or not, the Hawaiian and Mexican presentations had a beautiful if unplanned point of connection, as the Hula dancers did a Hawaiian cowboy song that mixed the Hawaiian and Spanish languages—a tribute to the Mexican/Spanish cowboys that came to Hawaii to teach the natives how to ranch. When one takes the broader view, we can see how we in the Americas are all connected culturally.
As we watched the performance, a friend of mine said that some multicultural festivals in other parts of the country are beginning to include representations from the LGBT community—another dimension of celebrating human diversity. This thought struck me as incongruous at first. Could Queer Nation, as a diverse identity not one born of geography, religion or colonialism, successfully stand alongside Hula and the Mexican Hat Dance?
I hadn't fully processed the friend's comment until after our second cultural experience yesterday, which was attending a discussion panel sponsored by the Metro Trans umbrella group. Several members of our Welcoming Congregation committee at First Unitarian thought this would be a valuable experience to hear a more in-depth discussion of the joys and struggles experienced by this amazingly diverse group of people who break all the rules about what it traditionally has meant to be a woman or a man.
There were people in various stages of transition from male to female and female to male, along with an intersex person (biologically both male and female) and a gender queer person (fluid gender identity). Like other human communities, there is a shared and sometimes contrasting set of norms that contributes to cultural identity: your gender identity (whether the identity in your mind matches your biological body), your affectional orientation (whom you're attracted to) and your expression (what gender or blend of genders you present to the world)—and the fact that all of these elements exist independently and in different combinations.
Like the melting pot of Hawaiian or Mexican culture, the result is a mosaic that is beautiful to behold when you open yourself to it and celebrate the individual within.
This weekend already has been a multicultural experience for my family and me. It began Friday night with treating ourselves to a Japanese dinner, with colorful sights, smells, flavors and textures.
And this continued into Saturday as Betsy and I enjoyed the Festival of Nations in Tower Grove Park (still on today, by the way, so it's not too late to enjoy it yourself if you're in St. Louis). Just like it is every year, the gathering was filled with sensory delights from every direction. It was harder than ever to choose which foods to sample—we tried Bulgarian this time. Last year was Ethiopian.
But the real focus of our afternoon was the main stage, where performers from all over the globe and here in St. Louis joined together to celebrate cultural heritage. Betsy has been learning Hula with a local group devoted to Hawaiian and Polynesian dance, and we watched the more experienced dancers performing for the crowd. While it's pleasurable to watch, the casual observer cannot fully grasp the underlying meaning of what the graceful hand motions, footwork and colorful costumes truly mean culturally. They are a set of unique customs that belong to a particular time and place in the world and we can only fully grasp the meaning if we immerse ourselves in study and practice.
Next it was the Mexican folk dancing group from Chicago. As I watched the bright colors, broad-brimmed hats and ornate twirling skirts, I was struck by how fluid these cultural practices and artifacts can be as human cultures blend and adapt. You could see clear influences from the original culture of the indigenous pre-colonial people, then with Spanish and some African influences layered on top. And the most striking thing was seeing how a lot of our own "American" culture, at least that in the Southwestern US, is actually Mexican/Spanish, including the cowboy hats and fringed buckskin jackets.
And believe it or not, the Hawaiian and Mexican presentations had a beautiful if unplanned point of connection, as the Hula dancers did a Hawaiian cowboy song that mixed the Hawaiian and Spanish languages—a tribute to the Mexican/Spanish cowboys that came to Hawaii to teach the natives how to ranch. When one takes the broader view, we can see how we in the Americas are all connected culturally.
As we watched the performance, a friend of mine said that some multicultural festivals in other parts of the country are beginning to include representations from the LGBT community—another dimension of celebrating human diversity. This thought struck me as incongruous at first. Could Queer Nation, as a diverse identity not one born of geography, religion or colonialism, successfully stand alongside Hula and the Mexican Hat Dance?
I hadn't fully processed the friend's comment until after our second cultural experience yesterday, which was attending a discussion panel sponsored by the Metro Trans umbrella group. Several members of our Welcoming Congregation committee at First Unitarian thought this would be a valuable experience to hear a more in-depth discussion of the joys and struggles experienced by this amazingly diverse group of people who break all the rules about what it traditionally has meant to be a woman or a man.
There were people in various stages of transition from male to female and female to male, along with an intersex person (biologically both male and female) and a gender queer person (fluid gender identity). Like other human communities, there is a shared and sometimes contrasting set of norms that contributes to cultural identity: your gender identity (whether the identity in your mind matches your biological body), your affectional orientation (whom you're attracted to) and your expression (what gender or blend of genders you present to the world)—and the fact that all of these elements exist independently and in different combinations.
Like the melting pot of Hawaiian or Mexican culture, the result is a mosaic that is beautiful to behold when you open yourself to it and celebrate the individual within.
