chapter3

	WHERE DO YOU BELONG? In his essay later in this chapter, Leonard Kriegel remembers the graffiti that was written on the surface of a tunnel leading to an abandoned reservoir in the North Bronx where he and his friends used to play when he was young. The tunnel was threatening enough, he recalls, but it was made more so by the "rage and fury" of the graffiti written on the walls in such phrases as "Unite Unite/Keep America White!" and "Kill all Jews!" "The graffiti on that tunnel wall mobilized my rage," he writes,

	nurturing my need for vengeance in the midst of isolation. It wasn’t simply the anti-Semitism I wanted vengeance upon; it was my own solitary passage through that entrance tunnel. As I moved through it alone, the tunnel was transformed into everything my budding sense of myself as embryonic American hated. Walking through it became an act of daring for graffiti had converted its emptiness into a threat that could only be taken the way it was offereda threat that was distinctly personal.
	That Kriegel sees the threat of the anti-Semitic graffiti as "distinctly personal" is poignant. His emotional response is not as a Jewish boy in behalf of all Jews, but as an individual whose place and sense of belonging in America seem challenged. He says, "Even the anti-Semitic graffiti of that tunnel remains in my memory as less the product of hatred than an expression of the distance existing between groups struggling to claim a portion of the American past." The racist writing on the wall poses a struggle for Kriegel between a sense of belonging and alienation. And it is that struggle, however overt or subtle it may be for any of us, that organizes the readings in this chapter.

	In the previous chapter, the readings focused on the idea of identityhow we come to be who we are. That chapter in many ways was about how outside forcesstories, beliefs, customs, or the environmentform the individual. In other words, Chapter 2 asks, what shapes us? This chapter changes the question somewhat to ask, what connects us? What connects us to the place, the community, or the culture that surrounds us? What gives or withholds a sense of belonging for us? In what ways do we feel the strengths of that connection? What challenges or threatens that sense of connection?

	Throughout these readings, the idea of belonging means different things. The first and most obvious is the kind of belonging that is rooted in a physical place. In an essay later in this book, Joel Garreau tells the story of a newspaper reporter who, having given up "the prestige of being a Washington correspondent in order to return to the quieter life of the medium-sized western paper," is driving across the country to the place in the Western United States where he grew up. As the reporter headed west, Garreau explains, he "hardly noticed his surroundings, wondering whether the choice he had made was right." Garreau goes on to relate:

	He told me he remembered with great clarity finally losing his indecision on Interstate 80, not far from Cheyenne, Wyoming, as the flatlands gave way to the mountains and their small towns. It was there, he said, that suddenly a knot disappeared from his stomach, a knot he hadn’t known was there. It was there that he discovered a feeling of familiarity with the colors, the horizon, the names of the towns. Every North American knows a place like that, a place where on your way back from your wandering, surroundings stop feeling threatening, confusing, or strange.
	Garreau claims that everyone has a place like this. When you’re in it, "you know you’re home." But what is it that makes a place feel like home? Returning to a place where we grew up that feels familiar is surely one kind of belonging. But it is only one, and the feeling of belonging that each of us needs and looks for is usually more complicated than simply being in a place or returning to our origins.

	What about, for example, people who migrate from one part of the country to another? Or even more pointedly, people who emigrate from another country? Can you ever have a sense of belonging not only in a place but also in a culture that differs from the one in which you were born and raised? In one of this chapter’s essays, the fiction writer Bharati Mukherjee discusses the two very different kinds of connection that she and her sisterboth residents of the United States for more than thirty yearsfeel for America. Mukherjee, who is Indian, married a non-Indian, Canadian citizen and hence adopted a new citizenship outside of India. Her sister married an Indian, and although she has worked in this country for thirty-six years, she dreams of retiring in India. About the differences in orientation, Mukherjee asks:

	In one family, from two sisters alike as peas in a pod, there could not be a wider divergence of immigrant experience. America spoke to meI married itI embraced the demotion from expatriate aristocrat to immigrant nobody, surrendering those thousands of years of "pure culture," the saris, the delightfully accented English. She retained them all. Which of us is the freak?
	The similarities and differences between the story Garreau tells and the situation Mukherjee describes are telling ones. In the story of the reporter who left Washington, D.C., to head back west, his return to a comfortable place was a matter of choice. He decided to return to a "home-place" waiting for him that made him feel as if he belonged. In contrast, Mukherjee’s immigrant situation is very different. She, unlike her sister, was even willing to give up the "purity" of her home culture to adopt a new onea culture that she connected with through a marriage across ethnic groups, a new citizenship, and a new cross-cultural identity. The reporter’s sense of belonging to a place was entirely in his own hands. For Mukherjee, her sister, and all immigrants (and to some extent for minorities in any situation), belonging depends both on individual choice and attitude and on the capacity of the surrounding culture to accept them. The struggle between belonging and alienation, in other words, can result from the interplay between internal attitude and external circumstances. The balance between those two forces depends a lot on who you aremajority, minority, native, immigrantin any given situation.

	This all points to one major set of questions posed in this chapter. A sense of belonging always comes at a price. That is, to feel part of something, to feel at home, you always have to give something up. What are the costs of belonging? What are the privileges? What does it mean to belong to a community or a culture? What is it about a sense of community or culture that gives people a feeling of belonging or alienation? What holds a community or a culture together, and how do individuals fit into them?

	BELONGING TO A CULTURE Probably the single most important concept related to belonging is culture. How is our sense of belonging dependent on culture? What does it mean to "belong" to a culture? Is it possible to belong to more than one culture? Do individuals belong to cultures, or are cultures the creations of individuals?

	Culture is a complicated word that has many different usages. Also, there are differing opinions about how culture should be defined. Most people would generally agree that culture is a set of customs, beliefs, rules, behaviors, and identities that constitute a "system" or "way of living" for a particular people. Although we might refine that definition, the common view is that "culture" is a system of living that connects people to their surrounding world.

	When people use a term like "American culture" to refer to the culture of the United States, they usually are implying two things simultaneously. On the one hand, they mean a national culture, one which is generated by a combination of media, economics, and the dominant political and social ideals. On the other hand, American "culture" often refers to the network of cultures that are somehow knit together, but not blended, within American society. Certainly, individuals can live within both of these notions of culture, and many people feel the doubleness of cultural belonging very strongly. For others, there is only a sense of being "an American." Nonetheless, all of us in one way or another in the United States belong to both a national culture and at least one cultural orientation that is defined by our class, "race," social status, gender or sexuality, or other influences. Whether or not one’s own personal cultural orientation has affinity or friction with the national culture varies from group to group and from person to person.

	Although culture is a complex idea used in the most sweeping and abstract ways, each of us can feel and experience our own culture every day in the smallest, most familiar, and most intimate things: in the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the holidays we celebrate, the songs we sing, and the rituals we practice. We can see culture in the most important values, or history, or heritage, but we can also feel it in the small things, in the personal details. One of those personal thingsone which has broad implicationsis language. As Victor Cruz, who immigrated from Puerto Rico to the United States, says of his bilingual nature:

	Because language represents a world, we can see the contradictions that besiege the users of the Spanish language in the United States; the world it is from is not in their presence. Words have lives of their own, it is what we fit into, were they not here before us. Experience is the word that passes through the things that we do. Language is a cultural attitude accumulated over the centuries.
	Language, like other aspects of our lives, often serves as an invisible link to our culture. If you happen to be bilingual or an immigrant, then language might be very visible. But many aspects of culture are invisible to us in the sense that they are habitual. Regardless of its precise definition, culture helps constitute our way of seeing the world. And oftentimes, we think of that way as the natural way and of other ways as different. This, then, is one of the links between culture and belonging. One way to think of "belonging" is as the way we feel when we’re at home with the language, beliefs, rituals, and practices of a particular culture.

	WHAT IS A COMMUNITY? Surely, though, we can feel a sense of belonging at more than one level at a time. A connection to a culture is just one level. Another critical level of personal connection is the idea of community. Like culture, the term "community" is used in many different ways and contexts. For simplicity, we can make two initial distinctions in the types of communities: physical communities and communities of interest. Physical communities are those where people are connected by their physical proximity, as in a part of a city, a rural area, a small town, or a neighborhood. Many uses of the concept of community have this idea as their premise, even if the implications of community consciousness go beyond mere geographical bonding.

	Probably the most comprehensive description of a physical community in this chapter is in Kai Erikson’s exploration of the meaning of community in Buffalo Creek, an area of Appalachia that was destroyed in a disastrous flood in 1972. His analysis of the communityby way of the residents’ self-description of what was "lost" in the floodleads him to describe something special and extraordinary in the social and emotional ties that form around physical proximity. These emotional ties are so important that Erikson distinguishes between a "community," which is based simply on physical proximity, and "communality," which is something else. He explains: "I use the term ‘communality’ here rather than ‘community’ in order to underscore the point that people are not referring to particular village territories when they lament the loss of community but to the network of relationships that make up their general human surround." For the people of Buffalo Creek, community is like a culture (and inseparable from it) because their sense of communality defines the web of living conditions that connects people to their world. As Erikson says, "The closeness of communal ties is experienced on Buffalo Creek as part of the natural order of things, and residents can no more describe that presence than fish are aware of the water they swim in. It is just there, the envelope in which they live, and it is taken entirely for granted."

	This comparison leads to one useful way to think about the relationship between culture and community. A culture is a network of beliefs, customs, practices, behaviors, and values. A community is a network of human relationships. The two togetherculture and communitygo a long way toward defining how and when we feel a sense of belonging and connection to our surroundings.

	Regardless of what kind of community we’re talking about, often implicit is the idea that people need to have a sense of community and that if it is lacking, people yearn for it. In the modern world we have many ways to find community other than just being in a physical location. As Scott Walker puts it (in his introduction to the Greywolf Anthology volume about "community"):

	We are no longer able to define community simply as "these people in this place." We’re faced with a complex set of options. We can find community through geographic location, geologic affinity (people who love the mountains), ethnic or racial cultures, peer and interest groups, regional and bioregional associations, sexual preference, linguistic and religious affiliations, etc. At the same time that the mass market works to blur the distinctions between us and we are faced with enormous pressure to homogenize, we must struggle to satisfy our basic need for community.
	It is interesting to consider that our modern need for community might spring from both a reaction to media and commercial culture trying to make us all the same, on the one hand, and the incredible diversity and politics of the world making us seem irreconcilably different, on the other. One dimension of both community and culture is the border where sameness and difference come together.

	WHAT MAKES INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS? If a culture is about shared practices and customs, and if a community is about interdependence of people who share resources or values, then what about people in those contexts who do not share in those practices or values? Do concepts like community and culture necessarily imply the existence of "insiders" and therefore also "outsiders"? Does some people’s feeling of belonging imply a sense of alienation for others? What if people feel alienated from the cultures that are supposedly their own?

	The sense of alienation or "outsiderness" is expressed in many ways in this chapter. For example, many of this chapter’s writers live in more than one place and spread their consciousness beyond more than one "home." Whether they have a double identification with the United States and India, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Canada, or China, many of these writers live with a double consciousness, their spirit and sensibilities existing in two cultures. In all cases of biculturalism, there is a distinct contrastand occasional conflictbetween the two geographies of identification. When Ivette Chavarria, one of the writers in this chapter, heads with her family from her residence in the United States to visit her relatives in Mexico, at first she feels at home. She says:

	We were a handful of Mexicans headed down to Mexico from California. I felt at home with what surrounded me when we crossed the border from Douglas, Arizona, into Agua Prieta, Mexico. Many if not all the aspects of Mexican living were integrated into our family’s way of living in Los Angeles. The language, music, food, morals, religion, and beliefs were all part of my upbringing.
	And yet after she arrives, her emotions are mixedshe feels like both an insider and an outsiderin part because of the reaction of some of her relatives: "The boys on the street had called me blond. They meant American. They meant different. They saw me as a tourist and a stranger. I ignored it and now it haunted me." Her ambivalence plays out during the remainder of her visit when the family’s rituals of food preparation and eating both attract and repulse her.

	By contrast, in "Borders," a story by Thomas King, a young boy tries to make sense of his mother’s behavior at the Canadian border. The mother is "Blackfoot" Indian, but when she crosses the border, the law requires that she declare her citizenship as either American or Canadian. The mother refuses to choose, insisting that she is only "Blackfoot," so considerable trouble ensues. The story invokes some of the critical questions raised earlier: What do you give up for a sense of belonging? What are the costs of belonging? What are the costs of refusing? King’s story reminds us of the personal dimensions of cultural belonging. As with Leonard Kriegel’s response to the hate-speech graffiti in the tunnel of his youth, these are not big, sweeping, abstract questions but rather are personal ones. What connects you, personally, to the people, institutions, and values around you?