For this paper, I wanted to talk about my experience as an international student in the United States. I moved out of my home country, Costa Rica, to follow my dreams as a dancer and create the life I have always wanted in the United States. I knew life was going to be drastically different once I moved to California, but if anything that was exactly what I wanted. I knew culturally there were going to be some differences, the language barrier was definitely going to take space, and the sense of community I had back home was something I was going to have to build on my own in a completely new environment. I had so much curiosity in me though, to take on a chapter of my life of self discovery, to experience life in different ways in different places. All of this has definitely been a part of my journey so far, however the changes I was thinking of were short of what I was about to encounter with. The experiences I am about to unravel have had a fundamental effect on the construction of my cross-cultural identity.
For some background, I started learning English when I was about 5 years old. As much as I grew up learning the language, I only spoke Spanish with my family and friends. I remember I would watch movies and TV shows in English and repeat what the characters were saying to practice my pronunciation, but it was once I started traveling to the United States that my English started to get much better. I began traveling the world and navigating through new intimidating spaces by myself when I was 15 years old. I was doing so to compete nationally and internationally for my dance career. I treasure and value all of the connections that occurred during these travels, as all these interactions took me down a maturing path that fostered growth socially, mentally, and emotionally. However, I was also exposed to the complications of being foreign at a very early age. The constant grammatical errors I would make made me really embarrassed and self conscious. I got used to my accent being pointed out by my friends and sometimes even by strangers. It became a habit to anxiously repeat what I wanted to say in my head several times before speaking to make sure I was saying things right. These experiences were subconsciously starting to build a strong negative relationship with the roots of my identity and a separation between myself and the world around me. It was until later on that I moved to the United States for school that this would come back to the surface.
Being an international student has meant having two different lives going on. One that is left behind, and one that is taken on. When I am in school in the United States, my life in Costa Rica is held on pause. When I am back home in Costa Rica during break, my life in the United States is held on pause. This also means that wherever I am, there is a pre-constructed life waiting for me. A specific language, a specific community, a specific routine. It is as if each life gets a different version of me. Being an international student has developed a very complex relationship with the construction of my identity. It feels like I have to fit into specific standards to fulfill the person that I am in each one of them, at the same time that it feels like I am being dragged away from the essence of who I am.
My lives are so different from each other that I feel constantly disconnected from who I am. Where I come from plants the roots of my identity, but where I am today takes me to the person I strive to become. My morals and values come from where I was raised, but my perspective on life has outgrown that small town in Costa Rica. Willingly living a life far from what life is like back home separates me from my roots, but who I am essentially separates me from my environment here in the United States. This has led to a sense of being foreign wherever I go. I feel too Spanish to blend in with the people around me in the United States, but feel too influenced by my American life to fit into my Spanish community.
This internal battle of belonging has a greater depth than just choosing from one or the other. There is a strong discomfort in witnessing how I start to adapt to a culture foreign of my own. There is an internalized struggle within me in allowing myself to flow through the cross cultural learning experience. When I see myself adapting to the fashion tendencies, or language slang, there is an internal battle with wondering if I am pretending to be someone I am not. It is already hard enough to find a sense of belonging in a new culture, environment, community, but now a sense of belonging within myself is threatened. It becomes difficult to strengthen a sense of being when externally and internally you are continuously disoriented. This is very well illustrated in the publishing of the Journal of Belonging, Identity, and Diversity on The Complexity of International Student Identity. Through the exemplification of a dual dimensional approach that was incorporated in the 1980s in the cross cultural research between the host country and home country, we find a multicultural model that intersects to create four cross cultural strategies for new immigrants: assimilation, separation, integration, and marginalization.
With this being said, I want to touch on the presence of xenophobia in the United States and its impact on the construction of my cross-cultural identity. In representation of a latina, I have faced stereotypes and cultural racism that have shaped my experience as an international student in many different ways. This was actually something I was able to truly uncover in my Ethnic Studies class in the first semester of freshman year in college. Through this course we talked a lot about media and how it creates these social constructs that we then as a viewer subconsciously absorb, influencing the way we perceive the world around us and within ourselves. This also opened a retrospective space of curiosity towards my own judgment. I began to ask myself how much of what I think of myself comes from what society has taught me about the people that look like me, come from a place like me, talk like me, etc. In a society that places Hispanic people in the media as dumb, naive, and as a sexual teaser, it becomes only natural to become conditioned to this pre-constructed script. The way you perceive yourself around others becomes affected by the way you have learned about how you are perceived in society.
The interaction between these stereotypes and biases that I have experienced as an international student has also had a strong weight in the construction of my intellectual identity. Reflecting on my academic journey as an international student in the United States, I find myself working against many of these pressures and prejudices. This is also tied to the conflation of all immigrants who speak Spanish and the stereotypes that it brings for them as rightful citizens of this country. When I first moved to the United States, I had a really really hard time speaking up about important topics, as much as I am someone who loves to be involved in these deep conversations and hear what others have to say. I was so scared of my accent coming across too strong and showing my ethnic background which would then feed into the idea that I am proof of that social identity. I feared that my accent would equal a lack of credibility in my opinions, even before I even spoke. This reflected how I myself believed this would have that effect on people, how my background, culture, language, and all these characteristics of who I am were a debilitating factor in my environment. I started believing it, I stopped participating in class because “I did not have anything to say”, I started becoming only smiles and nods to avoid any embarrassment. A strong and sad example of this internalized xenophobia is how I would justify all of my mistakes through humor by saying “I’m just Costa Rican, I don’t know what I’m saying!”. Looking back at that, I feel heartbroken that that is how I started treating myself.
The lack of intercultural awareness I have encountered in the United States has also constantly acted as a separation barrier between me and my environment. Most of my American friends have never traveled outside the Midwestern bubble, and on top of that the American educational system does not place much emphasis on gaining any cultural or geographical awareness outside of their own. Little things like people assuming I am from Mexico every single time they find out I am hispanic, people genuinely asking me if I live in a tree house, or people so deeply shocked that I can speak English are just a few things that heavily push me far from them in their perceptions of me and my culture.
There is a strong crisis in civic education in this country that is not making this issue any better for future generations. I do not feel understood by the people around me, and feel unimportant in their way of seeing the world. With the lack of cultural knowledge that young people in the United States carry in their judgment, they are judging the people based on their background which is already filtered by all forms of media that support these cultural biases. Media plays an incredibly strong part in these biases, as I elaborate later on in this paper. It makes young people oblivious and entitled to use their background as the one lens through which the world operates. In my research for this paper, I found a blog post by a former high school educator and now business consultant, Steven Hopper. Although this is not a research based source, his opinion on the fundamental role of educators in this issue is exactly what I am trying to point out. In his post he says,
Amongst many other topics he touches on, he mentions the power of understanding each other. By understanding culture it becomes easier to overcome barriers, to open space for everyone’s perspectives and voices, and essentially to help reconcile differences within the world and its people. I also believe that this understanding does not only apply to the audience that rejects the subject, but the subject itself as well. Like I mentioned before, there was a lot of internalized rejection that I had towards myself because of what has been socially fed in the media about the people that I fit in with. Questioning myself, diving into my background, and understanding who I am has allowed me to embrace and free myself from all the restrictive barriers society has built upon. With this being said, the importance of educators in the identity reconstruction for international students is critical for not only the subject but also the environment in which it is found. This also with the purpose to raise awareness and put a stop to the stereotypes and biases that our society works around, and in my experience, specially in the United States.
I am learning to allow the cross-cultural learning process to exist freely and take space in my life. An identity is determined by the understanding of a person’s relationship with the world, but if the world is ignorant and rejects the nature of diversity then it becomes difficult to find space for all internally and externally. It is vital to bring awareness to the transitions that international students go through in this process so that they do not lose themselves through a society that inevitably blurs down their essence. The experiences I have had as an international student have shaped who I am and who I want to become. This has either been achieved through overcoming the pressures that society has put upon me or by the continuous encouragement and self discovery that I have come across with in this transitional time in the construction of my identity.
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