Hispanic Culture & Heritage
Culture is spread all around the world, culture identifies where we are from and who we are. Culture and heritage are what we live, do, and believe in. We all have a culture or heritage where we come from. What represents us as a person. It marks our paths and makes us different and who we are. Hispanic culture can be very different depending on where you come from, but at the end of the day, we are all the same. We are just immigrants who try to adjust and enjoy their lives to something new, but our culture, love, and family pulls us back to who we really are and where we belong.
Sometimes people just don’t understand the importance of heritage and culture. People are forgetting the meaning and its significance. There are many ways of keeping heritage and culture alive, but we just don’t do it. People just move and start losing their culture, forget about their heritage and even lose their own language. We should never forget where we come from no matter where we are.
New beginnings
We all know that new beginnings are never easy and worse when you must leave everything you love behind, including family, friends, home, money, jobs and mostly our culture and heritage.
Camila Ramos, an 18-year-old coming from Venezuela, born and raised said. ¨It is hard to sometimes to leave our whole life behind because it does hurt but what we should never do is to forget about what we do not have at our side right now. Always remember our family and bring our culture with us, so it feels a little like home.”
How to be different with our culture
Our culture makes us different from everyone else. Others might think we are weird or just don’t belong here. Truth is us Hispanics are made different and we are very much proud of that. Our culture, heritage, legacy and generations say a lot about who we are and how strong we can be. From different styles of music, dancing to celebrations such as Day of the Dead to carnivals like in Rio and traditions handed down to each generation these things impact us and made up our culture.
But what exactly makes us different, according to Marlon Baro, a 17-year-old Cuban immigrant, “our difference is our beliefs, acts and our perspective on life also the way we do things in our own way.”
“The way we are free and wild, that we do not care about anything and if we want something we just do it. We are different in our own way, and we are who we want to be, and we never give up no matter what we are going through or what we went through,” Marlon said.
Hispanic culture is not something that you just celebrate, it’s something that we practice and live.
Why are we losing our heritage?
We are losing our heritage every day more and more, not just that but also our beliefs and our traditions. It’s so easy to just let some things in our life slide and forget them but we can learn how to keep them if we learn the real importance of it. Our heritage is not our culture, our heritage is our past, family history and a lot more.
But what can we do to always keep our heritage alive? We can talk to our elders, find old pictures of them and ask about their stories and life lessons, practice what they used to practice and believe. Keep the family practices and love alive.
A better question there could be, how or why are we losing our heritage?
Saray Gainza, a 17-year-old Cuban born in the U.S knows said, ¨I think the generations are changing little by little the parents are not raising their kids the same, they think differently, and the values and traditions are gone.”
We ourselves are changing our heritage without even knowing it.
How can your cultural heritage change your life?
Our past family history can change us and our thinking in so many ways. By family mixing and new culture created.
Like a young lady name Ange Stadium said, “I am 16 years old, and I am mix, my mom is Mexican and my dad is American, I think this changed my life a lot because of the mix culture I have, my mom practices different things than my dad so we created our own practices that are mixed.”
Another Mexican who was born and raised in Mexico named Dulio Mendoza, a
15-year-old immigrant said being Mexican and having the culture makes him feel special and different. He also said that his family traditions always make him happy and makes him smile.
Our Hispanic cultural, heritage and our traditions make us feel happy, like at home. A safe place to be who we are and we should be proud of it always and forever, the Hispanic culture will live in our hearts with pride and valor.
