CHAPTER TWO

WHY MEXICANS SPEAK SPANISH

Sources of Cultural Identity

The continuing existence of different languages and cultures around the world might seem out of step with the homogenizing forces of globalization. However, culture and our cultural identity have a profound influence on how we think, feel, and act. The history of how cultures develop helps us understand the persistence of cultural influence and the importance of multiculturals.

Before the European discovery of what is now Mexico, a small number of shipwrecked sailors showed up on the shores of the Yucatán Peninsula. One of these was a Castilian named Jerónimo de Aguilar. After narrowly escaping being the featured actor in a Maya ritual sacrifice, de Aguilar and another shipwreck survivor, Gonzalo Guerrero, escaped into the interior, where they encountered a friendlier tribe (they were both enslaved, but at least they hadn’t been eaten). Both de Aguilar and Guerrero assimilated into the Maya culture—learning the language and adopting Indian ways; Guerrero took a Maya wife who bore him two children. Eight years later, Hernán Cortés made several brief forays into the Yucatán and learned of his countrymen’s existence. Guerrero and de Aguilar reacted to Cortés’s arrival in different ways. Guerrero, completely Mayanized, refused to join his countrymen and was later killed while fighting on the side of the Indians against the Spaniards. De Aguilar, by contrast, was pleased to be reunited with his countrymen, and Cortés ransomed him from his Indian captors for a few glass beads. Regardless of his initial reasons for contacting his countryman, Cortés soon came to realize that de Aguilar’s knowledge of the language and culture of the Maya could be invaluable in his quest for gold. The rest, as they say, is history; the invasion of the Spanish changed the language, religion, and many aspects of culture of this part of the world. Without the multicultural skills of de Aguilar, things might have turned out differently.¹ There are numerous other examples of a culture being affected by colonization. However, there is perhaps no better example of how the skills of a multicultural individual influenced the process of cultural development. While cultures continue to evolve, they are deeply woven into the fabric of the society.

All societies must develop ways to deal with three fundamental issues. The first issue is the preservation of the society itself. For example, societies set up mechanisms to defend themselves from threats both real and imagined.

The second issue is the nature of the relationship between the individual and the group and the coordination of social interaction. For example, people in many Western cultures shake hands with their right hand as a form of greeting. Initially, this was probably an indication that no weapon was being held or about to be drawn with the dominant right hand. Similarly, the Maori of New Zealand have an elaborate challenge ceremony or wero, which involves sending forth warriors who challenge the visiting party by prancing about and brandishing fighting weapons followed by presenting a token on the ground to their leader, to determine the intentions of visitors. Having determined the intent of a visitor, there is no need in this culture to display an empty right hand as a form of friendly greeting. As a sign of peace, the Maori greeting among individuals is to press noses, or hongi.²

The third issue is the relationship of people to the natural world. Societies are made up of people—biological organisms that must deal with basic issues such as food and protection from the elements. Evidence of the response of society to the natural world is found in the delightful variety of cuisines around the world that have their basis in the availability and preference for certain ingredients. Societies have developed different ways of solving these three fundamental issues because of differences such as climate, geography, the indigenous economy, and interaction with other societies. This is the source of culture.

Culture

Over time, societies have developed (sometimes elaborate) sets of values, attitudes, and assumptions about appropriate behavior that are associated with being a member of that society. This cultural knowledge is passed on from one generation to the next. Guidance about behavior that is considered appropriate in a particular culture is often contained in the stories that parents tell their children, such as those about societal heroes.³ For example, people in the United States know that the story of George Washington’s life demonstrates honesty because of his willingness to accept the consequences of chopping down a cherry tree by confessing to it. People in Saudi Arabia know to be kind to spiders because they protected the prophet Muhammad by hiding him from his enemies. People in China know to honor their teachers on September 29 to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Confucius. This knowledge has a long-lasting effect because it is learned, often at an early age, in terms of fundamental beliefs about the way we should behave or the goals to which we should aspire. This is why cultural differences continue to exist in the face of the homogenizing effects of globalization.

A side effect of the creation of cultural groups with fundamental beliefs about how things should be or how we should behave is the attitude of ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s own cultural group is the center of everything and all other groups are evaluated with reference to it. Ethnocentric beliefs include the following:

♦ What goes on in our own culture is seen as natural and correct, and what goes on in other cultures is unnatural and incorrect.

♦ We perceive our own cultural customs as universally valid.

♦ We unquestionably think that our cultural norms, roles, and values are correct.

♦ We believe that it is natural to help and cooperate with members of our own culture, to favor and feel proud of them, and to be distrustful and even hostile toward members of other cultures.⁴

This categorization of them and us is a natural process of the formation of different cultural groups, and it underlies many of the issues facing the world today.

The persistence of cultural differences around the world does not mean that cultures are completely resistant to change. On the contrary, some aspects of culture are influenced by modernization. In today’s society all people may need to possess a core set of psychological characteristics to survive.⁵ In modern postindustrial societies, most people spend their productive time interacting with people and symbols, with a growing emphasis on self-expression and autonomous decision making. Therefore, to survive in this modern context, people may need to have a sense of personal efficacy, an egalitarian attitude toward others, an openness to innovation and change, independence or self-reliance, and high achievement motivation.⁶ While the demands of modern society may blur some cultural differences, it is important not to apply the notion of a convergence of cultures too broadly. The case of the McDonaldization of the world provides an example. The seemingly identical McDonald’s restaurants that exist almost everywhere actually have different meanings and fulfill different social functions in different parts of the world. Although the physical facilities are similar, eating in a McDonald’s is a different social experience in Japan or China or the United States or France.⁷ In the same way, what it means to be modern can take on different forms in different societies.

Culture is more than a random assortment of customs. It is an organized system of values, attitudes, beliefs, and behavioral meanings that are related to one another, to a society’s physical environment, and to other cultural groups. It is often very hard to understand facets of culture outside their cultural context. For example, Americans believe that people should take responsibility for themselves and not rely on others.⁸ However, the United States has the highest percentage of charitable giving in the world, and Americans readily volunteer their time to help with community projects and in emergencies. This seeming paradox is explained by recognizing the requirement to help those in need that was forged on the American frontier.⁹ Under normal circumstances Americans believe that one should take personal responsibility and not rely on others. However, some situations can overwhelm individual initiative and ingenuity and require the help of others. Therefore, not only are these cultural traditions not contradictory, they are logical when considered in the context of how American culture developed.

People often talk about the values associated with a culture. Values, which are beliefs about what ought to be or how one should behave, are consciously held in the sense that they are explanations for the observable features of culture. For example, Chinese people work hard because they were taught that people should work hard. The ultimate source of these values is the basic underlying assumptions, which are shared by the culture, and which are held deeper in people’s knowledge. These basic ways of reacting to the world shape beliefs, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings at an unconscious level and are taken for granted by members of a cultural group; therefore, the effects of culture are often not apparent to a society’s members and are often overlooked. For example, Americans may not know why it is normal to give to charity or to volunteer in an emergency; they just know this is the way it is. And the act of bowing as a way of communicating with others is so deeply ingrained in Japanese people that they are often seen bowing to the unseen partner in a telephone conversation. Three things about culture are important to remember:

1. Culture is the meanings that are shared by members of society—a social group.

2. These cultural meanings are learned from previous generations.

3. Language is an especially important artifact of culture that helps to perpetuate the culture and shapes the way people view the world.¹⁰

Understanding that culture is associated with social groups has important implications for the emergence of multicultural individuals as a key component of the workforce. First, our membership in a cultural group helps to determine how we perceive ourselves—our self-identity—as well as how others perceive us. Second, groups have systems of norms and expectations about appropriate behavior that give them stability despite changes in their membership. However, the characteristics of groups can in fact change as key members or large numbers of members come and go as indicated by the Spanish influence in Mexico. The circumstances that ripped de Aguilar and Guerrero from their Castilian culture are of course unusual and dramatic. However, migration across cultural boundaries has been occurring for all of human existence, and the forces of globalization have made the boundaries to such migration permeable.

The current magnitude of migration is large indeed. According to the Global Commission on Migration, there were nearly 200 million migrants in 2005, counting only those who have lived outside their country for a year or more. This is equivalent to the population of the world’s fifth-largest country—Brazil. Economic opportunity is a big driver of migration. For example, up to 20 percent of the total population of New Zealand has migrated to live and work outside their country.¹¹ Two recent trends in migration are worth noting. First, the number of women migrants is increasing. In 1976 fewer than 15 percent of migrants were women, while in 2005 more than half were females.¹² Second, the traditional migration pattern following World War II was the flow of low-skilled workers from less developed to more developed countries. Today’s migrants are much more likely to be highly skilled.

Migrating to a new country is a dramatic event, as the following immigrant stories suggest:

I didn’t know much at the time, as it all happened so fast. I knew my parents were trying to get us to Canada, but the actual move happened within a couple of weeks. To be honest, I was scared because, I hate to admit it, but I was one of those people who thought Canada was a country full of snow, ice and igloos. I was convinced I would have to dogsled to school. . . . When I first joined my swim club, Toronto Swim Club, I could barely speak a word of English, but being in a team allowed me to interact and pick up the language within months with the help and patience of my team. I was dropped into a new country and new environment, which is a hard thing to deal with, but the pool became a place for me where I knew people and people knew me. It was a familiar environment in an unfamiliar world. (Hungarian born Canadian Olympic swimmer Zsofia Balazs)¹³

I was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone. There was a war in my home country, so we had to leave. When I was six, my family was living in a refugee camp in Liberia, which is a country that neighbors Sierra Leone. We were picked by some officials there to come to America. I was really sad because I had to leave my family and friends; I will not get to see them again until I am grown and can go back to Liberia as an adult. Leaving was hard, but my mom made me feel better by telling me that in America we would learn to use the telephone to keep in touch. Now, I can call my family and talk to them by phone. They speak Mende, and I speak English to them to help them learn my new language, too. (Vandi, age 12, now living in the United States)¹⁴

We had to deny our Polish heritage in order to become German as quickly as possible. During my childhood, many Germans still had negative views of Poland, and I wanted to have nothing to do with it. At home, my parents spoke Polish, but I spoke back to them in German. German officials changed my name: from Alicja to Alice. Within a year, I learned to speak German without an accent. Many years later, at the age of 16, I went to the United States for a year as an exchange student. Being Polish didn’t carry the same baggage there as it did in Germany. People just said, “Oh, great!” That was totally new to me. It was an important step that led me to decide to reclaim my second half, my Polish identity. (Polish-born German author Alice Bota)¹⁵

All immigrants have a unique personal story. The way in which an individual responds to the new environment will be specific only to them, because each individual has personality characteristics that are shared by no one else. Extroverts may be more likely to seek out new friends in the foreign culture, and individuals who are open to new experiences may feel less threated by the differences they encounter. However, regardless of personality, age, country of origin, or the country to which they migrated, and regardless of their economic status, their stories have a consistent theme. It is a search for their identity—how they fit into the new and strange environment in which they find themselves. Of course, in many cases this means learning a new language as well. The process of adjusting to a new cultural environment is called acculturation.

Acculturation

Acculturation involves the psychological and behavioral changes that people experience because of contact with another culture. Typically, it is used to describe the changes in people who relocate from one culture to another, such as Guerrero and de Aguilar, in the story that opened this chapter. However, acculturation can also occur on a larger collective scale when a whole group, as opposed to the individual, changes (e.g., the large group of Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands or the nation of Japan when controlled by the United States after World War II).¹⁶ The gradual process of psychological acculturation that occurs during immigration results in changes in individual behavior, identity, values, and attitudes.¹⁷ Guerrero, in addition to acquiring a Maya wife, also acquired, among other things, Maya facial tattoos and holes in his ears for ornaments. However, his shipmate de Aguilar assimilated somewhat less to the Maya culture. The acculturation patterns of individuals and groups can be influenced by a number of individual differences and situational factors. The status of individuals, their facility in communicating in the local language, their personality, and whether the immigrants forge relationships with host country nationals or with coethnics (people like themselves) are all factors that influence acculturation patterns. For example, recent research found that individuals who formed initial close relationships with coethnics had a strong tendency to adhere to their culture of origin, while those who (like Guerrero) formed initial close relationships with host nationals showed a stronger tendency to adapt to the new culture.¹⁸

Adapting to a new culture is not easy. The severe disorientation that people feel when experiencing an unfamiliar way of life is called culture shock and results from the absence of a familiar language and cues to appropriate behavior.¹⁹ It’s somewhat like waking to find the landscape covered with new-fallen snow in which everything familiar has disappeared. Trying to find one’s way without familiar landmarks can cause uncertainty and stress. Navigating a new culture with its different set of attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions about appropriate behavior is equally disconcerting.

For some people adjustment to the new culture is successful. Guerrero met a romantic partner in the new environment. Some people’s view of the new country becomes so positive that they lose all desire to return home, like Mike in the following story:

As he looked out from the top-floor restaurant over Lake Michigan and the magnificent Chicago skyline, Yukimichi (Mike) Kusumoto thought about how his expatriate assignment to the United States had turned into a permanent move. Intially, like many Japanese, he had great difficulty adjusting to the extreme foreignness of the United States. The crime rate statistics were so frightening that he came to Chicago without his wife Naoko and his children, intending to accomplish his assignment and then return to his firm back in Japan. However, what was even more frightening when he arrived was the amazing diversity in America. The sheer variety of people and cultures in Chicago was startling. At the office, he had initially been frustrated by the shortsightedness of his colleagues, their failure to treat customers as “honored guests,” and their use of lawyers to protect them from their own hasty decisions. Yes, adjusting to the United States had been difficult.

He couldn’t say exactly when he began to feel more comfortable here in Chicago than back in Tokyo. Of course his English was now very good, and Naoko had joined him after a year and had eventually integrated well into American society. By carefully observing and trying to understand the American business practices, he had finally been very successful—so successful that a competing company had eventually headhunted him to a much higher salary. Even though he had insisted that his two daughters go to the special Japanese school in the Chicago suburb where they lived, they were now as American as they were Japanese—not a bad thing, he thought. Now he expected that they would attend an American university rather than go back to Japan. For himself Yukimichi had grown to appreciate the American way of life. He enjoyed its freedoms and spontaneity and loved his spacious home and beautiful neighborhood—such a contrast with the tiny apartment he had left in Tokyo. He had even found himself admiring the independence of Americans, and he did his best to act that way himself. It seemed to suit his personality. Go back to Japan? No, he was an American now.²⁰

Some individuals with experience living in multiple cultures acculturate to the extent that they demonstrate the ability to function effectively in more than one culture. But not everyone does, and not everyone becomes multicultural as a result. Time living in another culture or through intensive daily interaction with people who are culturally different develops cultural flexibility so that people can adjust their behavior based on the cultural context of the situation. Becoming multicultural involves more than just adopting the behavioral patterns of another culture; it means internalizing aspects of the other culture at a deep level.

Summary

Today, we are all in contact with individuals who identify with cultures different from our own, and often with more than one culture. The result of changing migration patterns and national differences in birth rates, coupled with other boundary-spanning aspects of globalization, is changing the nature of the workforce in most of the world. More and more individuals in organizations have multicultural experience, and many are multicultural. In order to take advantage of their multicultural minds to create innovation in organizations, we must first understand multicultural individuals. A first step in that understanding is recognizing that the cultural values, attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions about appropriate behavior are programmed at a deep level. We learn these things as a result of being members of a cultural group. We learn them at a young age from our parents or others who influence us. While this mental programming can change through acculturation, it is resistant to change. The way in which culture is learned makes it invisible, sometimes even to members of the culture. Like the invisible jet streams that guide the path of weather systems, culture has a powerful hidden influence on behavior.²¹ Multicultural individuals are different because they have internalized two, or sometimes more, sets of these cultural frameworks that guide their lives. To develop a multicultural mind, they must be able to hold different conceptions of themselves reflecting these different cultural assumptions. How this occurs is the subject of the next chapter.