Roots and Rhinestones, and what is culture anyway?

I love airports. Airports always make me nostalgic and pensive, and make me want to write. I feel like I could write on everything, everywhere, on every piece of this seat I am sitting on, every piece of the barren wall in front of me, on every inch of my own skin. The words I have right now would spill over the ceiling of the library’s walls and run marathons over its bookshelves. Sometimes I wish my brain just wrote everything down somewhere every time I thought it. But then I would have an entire novel for every day of my life, and I would never have time to read them all.  

Airports make me think about my roots. I am at the waiting area. There is a sign in front of me that says Tulsa, Oklahoma. I remember the last time I was here - is that crazy? I know the exact last time I walked through the corridor into United gates b76-80 in the Houston airport.  I was leaving for the first big adventure of my life, but Mother Nature chose to make me wait, showering her power over the US South with one of her famous June Thunderstorms. After all the built up anxiety and anticipation, Michael and I would have to spend an extra night in a smokey hotel room in Houston before we could officially begin our Trip Round the World.  I remember the naivety I possessed that rainy night, hiding my fear behind a feigned excitement, hiding my insecurity behind a feigned love. Or maybe it wasn’t feigned, it was just young. I wonder if I am truly any older than I was that night, walking through this same corridor. Maybe older doesn’t even matter. Maybe there is no older, no more mature, no better understood. Maybe its all just different experiences and they all need to be told.

Now I’m back in that same corridor, flying back to that same place I came from, Oklahoma – where the wind comes right behind the rain. There is a family sitting behind me boasting their country-ness, that Thing I have always been so turned off by, or so ready to refute from my roots. This guy has a giant belt buckle with a big “OU” engraved on it, an emblematic artifact of sorts that explains where our values lay. One of the daughters is showing off the sparkly rhinestones she got after her recent visit to the Natil salon, and telling Mom she is disgusted by Starbucks’ recent decision to start using Greek yogurt in all of their fruit cups.  There seems to be a Family Brawl a brewin’ regarding who has what seat, next to whom, and in what boarding group. I have yet to look at my plane ticket.  I have spent $8 on a damn fruit cup in the airport (not from Starbucks but yes, with Greek yogurt). I’m confused - is the fruit sweeter here or something? Maybe its this weird perception us expats get when we fly back into the States, like our mind plays tricks on us with all the fanciness and we begin to think everything is just nicer here. Maybe it’s the impossibility of it all, like my brain can’t process the idea of sweet pineapple in April in Texas, so it imagines it to be some miracle. Sometimes I wish I didn’t know what a fresh, tropical pineapple tasted like so I could stop complaining about these things. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

But things are fancier here. And I judge myself for not participating, and then I judge others around me for participating, and then I judge myself for judging. The last time I had mangos and pineapples I was sweating in a tropical cornfield. I watched a slight breeze blow my skirt back and I remember literally thanking ‘god’ for the phenomenal movement, then praying that the well water used to wash off the pineapple didn’t give me parasites.  During that particular fruit fest I licked my hands and my face, and used that same skirt to wipe my sticky fingers before heading back to the open fire where the tortillas were being prepared. During today’s particular fruit fest, I have three times as many utensils than I need, all of them made of unrecyclable plastic that will contribute to a landfill soon, wrapped in five napkins that I can’t figure out the reason for. I still can’t seem to keep myself clean. I dropped a strawberry on the ground, a perfectly red and perfectly quartered strawberry on the ground.  Oops. Here comes the judgment.

I sat next to a man from Sololá today. His eyes agape and his adrenaline skyrocketing, we lifted off and he captured every moment on his digital camera. He told me it’s his first time on a plane. He is going to Nebraska as an exchange student. I asked him if he was excited, as if his smile didn’t tell me enough. “It’s hard to leave my family, my community, Sololá.”  I thought about all the times I have gotten on a plane, eager to escape my family, my community, my culture, whatever I thought it was. Yesterday I wrote down a question for our Semilla Nueva Community Survey – “Usted pertenece a algun grupo indigena?”  Now I find myself asking the same – “Y tú Kristina? To what group or culture do you belong?” Isn’t it so funny how my culture, the X, Y or whatever letter they are calling us now, this generation of middle class yuppie twenty somethings with too many things to choose from – we run from our culture. We justify this by citing our society’s lack of culture. We run looking for culture. We say the US is just a big melting pot of materialism and obesity and narrow-mindedness. And here I am next to a young man from quite a narrowly-defined culture who is running towards that melting pot, running toward the diversity and opportunity and ‘culture’. Damn, I guess the grass really is always greener on the other side.

There is culture here. Maybe I never wanted to see it before, or maybe I saw it and didn’t like it. Or maybe I’m just an XYZ generation yuppie who constantly needs something new. But there is culture here. At least half of the clothing worn on this plane is either Carhart material or OU propaganda. There are more cowboy hats than huipiles and more gawdy silver jewelry than machetes.  These are my roots, and so what? A que cultura pertenece tú Kristina?