Prompt Entry 1

The culture that nurtured me is the displaced Cuban exile culture of Miami. Both my parents are Cuban. My mother is from outside Havana, and left as a young child, and my father is from Oriente, the eastern side of the island, and left I believe as a young man about my age or maybe a little older (I don't know exactly because he doesn't talk about it).

Importantly, unlike many other immigrants from Latin America, they never return to visit their homeland, partially because they can't and partially because they would never want to. Unlike many other Cubans, they don't romanticize what Cuba used to be like before 1959, and have no illusions it can somehow go back to being that way. They have devoted themselves entirely to becoming Americans, and proudly think of themselves as such. Although their home definitely retains certain strongly Cuban characteristics, like a lot of their principles for raising children for example, it definitely has many more typically suburban American qualities as well.

The landscape that nurtured me is really nothing more than my mother's garden, which she's always been very devoted to. There is much to say about her garden, which has gone through many different phases from orchids to herbs to butterfly gardening to now fruit trees. That small perimeter of our house was where I got essentially all of my natural exposure as a child, and even though her garden is very small, it may have been enough! There were many interesting animals that would visit, my favorite being these rather large lizards called Knight Anoles.

The interesting parallel that can be drawn between my own cultural upbringing and the natural landscape that surrounded my childhood is the fact that one of my mother's favorite things about her garden is that it happens to straddle the line between tropical and temperate. What this means is that she can grow some trees from the temperate region that can only grow in Miami as part of their southernmost territory, like Magnolia. Meanwhile, she can also grow some tropical trees in their very uppermost northern territory, like Lignum Vitae and Guanabana.

A fact which perfectly coincides with my own upbringing. While I'm as American as anyone else, part of my upbringing and identity now and forever is that my family is Cuban. Not only that, they are Cuban exiles, which is a whole unique circumstance, especially among Latinos in the United States. Just as my mother delighted in growing Live Oaks next to Papaya trees, I straddled both my Cuban ancestry and American identity, and even now still do.

While I don't under any circumstance wish to identify that as my predominant and most important defining characteristic, it is a huge part of who I am, and I don't shy away from being Cuban. Just like my mother's garden, I am a hybrid.