The things you learn...

By. Kaylah Cruz-Herrera

Are you Moroccan?

           

I get that a lot.  While shopping, while getting into a taxi, while drinking tea with family friends:  You look so Moroccan!  It's amusing and flattering.  I usually laugh and explain that my dark hair and eyes come from my Mexican heritage.  But, this small idea makes me consider one big one:  how much of culture goes beyond looking the part?

Imagine this:  you, an American, go out dressed in full niqab (or burqa, the full face covering) and you want to buy some groceries.  From your appearance, people are inevitably going to assume you are Moroccan, but, as soon as you open your mouth, they'll know you're an American.  And I don't just mean the lack of Arabic skills or the heavy English accent; I mean the ideas.  Who knows, maybe they'll be able to tell that you are a little different, a little foreign, just from your walk.

My host sister and I have this joke.  Whenever she tells me to do something, she always says, "Obviously!" because things that appear so natural to Moroccans are actually very unnatural to me.  For example, I go to the hammam (public bath) about once a week.  Before, I would always carry my bathroom products in a bag and hold my towel in my hand.  When my host sister saw me recently, she laughed.  It was the strangest idea to her that someone would be able to know that I was going to the hammam.  Obviously!!

It seems strange to me now, but when I first came to Morocco what shocked me the most were the similarities, not the differences.  My host siblings wear Western clothes, watch MTV and American movies, and love American music.  I was expecting a world that was extremely different from the United States, so when I saw a world that had a heavy Western influence, I ignored all of the subtle distinctions that make Morocco Morocco.

I cannot even attempt to describe Moroccan etiquette and lifestyle.  What I can talk about is how living within the Moroccan culture has made me realize my American identity.

Growing up as a person of color in the United States has always meant that I felt a strong connection to another culture.  My family always told me, "You're Mexican."  In the U.S., I feel a strong connection to my heritage and I feel the need to tell people that I come from this prospective different than the American prospective.  In Morocco, I feel American.  When I think of all of the things that I long for back home and when I make connections between Moroccan culture and my culture, I'm thinking about the United States.  

In Morocco, I can't tell someone that I am Mexican.  Moroccans get confused and expect me to have extreme patriotism towards Mexico, a country that I've never even seen.  Although I think that my family has values that are different than the typical White household in the United States, I have to admit that the U.S. is very diverse and that the American culture is my culture.

Living in Morocco has made me realize that I am American.  I might have grown up in a household that doesn't fit the Moroccan stereotypical American household, but that's the beauty of the United States.  We have lots of diverse cultures, but, somehow, we're all the same.  

An example:  despite everyone in the NSLI-Y group growing up across the US, we can all sing "I'll Make a Man Out of You" from Disney's Mulan. 

It's silly, but it's something that we students, as Americans, all grew up with.

I appreciate having this experience in another country because I realized how much I love the United States, how much I am apart of the American society, and how much I want to work to improve America in the future.