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Yaneth Garcia

Professor Shahrazad Encinias

CAS 115

26 October 2023

Central Americans Heritage

Central Americans in the United States tend to become unfamiliar with their roots, values

and culture over time after living in the United States. Authors Beatriz Cortez and Douglas

Carranza make the argument that “Central American people don’t see identity as a complex

process of their lives, they live with the ideas that being part of another country where they

received better opportunities, escaping for violence, poverty, and being able to have a good work

makes them superior to others that doesn’t have the same opportunities, and they start thinking of

themselves and how other people view them”. However, there are different characteristics that

identify different types of people. It’s human nature to begin to separate by group, which forces

people to see themselves in a different way, implying that their social relations and culture are

changing. Culture includes values, beliefs and behavior to connect with close people or with the

community without judging because each mind has their own opinions and ways of thinking. But

what is culture? Culture is everything that is part of people’s daily life, when they interact with

people, making connections, activities, socialization, etc. This concept is what people need to

survive in a peaceful and a healthy environment. According to Lucila D. Ek, in her article Allá

en Guatemala, she writes that “ the Central American population is transforming once Mexican

and Chicano communities into heterogeneous Latino/a communities because they get used to
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being separated from other people or communities that don't seem good for society”. First

generation Central Americans in the United States are losing their values and culture to the point

that they don’t recognize their own identity because they are adapting to a new life in a foreign

place, joining a new community, learning a new culture and overcoming discrimination.

In “Centro America Identities” article by Cortez and Carranza, states that “there are

different groups of people that inhabit the region showing significant variability in terms of

social organization, religion, and culture.” Culture plays a significant part to share and learn in

any place you go without forgetting. Which means that people are getting the pattern to feel

superior to others because not everyone receives unique opportunities to grow, and makes people

lose confidence to show who people are and feel excluded from groups of people who seem to be

normal but not for the changes that people make. Other people say that identity is not permanent

as we might imagine from example of our life experiences, but if you think about it, identity is

constructed through culture and through the daily practices or routines that we have as a person,

and not from the preference from other people or groups who are in charge of being separated for

being different where everyone is considered equal. That’s the reason why they get into groups

of people with names that identify discrimination and prejudice against people based on race and

ethnicity. Over time these mistakes can get out of control. And why do I say mistakes? Because

the mistake that every human being is making is adapting to a new generation that is not being

healthy to update new communities that are based on prejudice and discrimination towards other

people and is simply what harms people in various aspects of life. For example, the topic of

social organization in various communities is interacted in groups and they look for ways to
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connect, share ideas to create a good environment or have a good result of whatever their

objective is to create a good culture.

In the article “Allá en Guatemala,’’ Ek, D. maintains that “There are important

differences between first and second generation, and how the communities act about their

education, English fluency, cultural attitudes between foreign-born and U.S Latino.” First-and

second generation collapse, and issues specific to the second generation are obscured by those of

the first generation which cause problems with the Mexican- American and Central America

people. This article explores and shapes the language, religion and identity of the

second-generation of Centro America by examining the transnational experience of people.

Using a transnational lens to understand the migration experience reveals that the lives of

immigrants and their children are shaped by values, ideas, and practices from the multiple sites

and levels of the transnational social fields they inhabit. This concept was also worked on in

groups and similarities to maintain a good purpose in life together with other people. However,

being part of rationalism and forgetting values and culture, affects personal

experiences that causes indifferences, for example; when the author Edgar Gomez tells

a story about his family who lose some values and he wrote it in a book called High-Risk

Homosexual, who has past experiences for being different in the eyes of his family. This

situation creates conflicts that can hurt the life of persons who want to do what they like and feel

free without discrimination and live with confidence that anyone is gone to judge you.

Additionally, the Centro America communities is getting good and bad experiences because now

the new generation thinks differently.

In the book High Risk Homosexual, the author's family who have roots from Nicaragua

and Puerto Rico have a machismo problem that usually is common in Centro America families.
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The book talks about how people grow with this type of root of discrimination,

something or someone different that they don’t usually see in society. People who are not ready

to see unusual changes that usually happen in life over time and act as if it affects our

community, which for others is a drastic change that had never been seen but that sooner or later

was going to happen. That is what happened with the author of the book Edgar Gomez, who

passed emotional experiences that caused him conflicts in his mind. He always knew that as a

person you can define what you want to be, when he states “A boy is not something you’re born

as, but rather an identity you inherit — this piece of paper, if nothing else, is proof of that.” For

Latino/a is normal to see people who are forced to be how they want you to be, it is a problem

that Spanish speakers use to define all mens with strong and aggressive masculine pride. He

passed through machismo experiences from part of his uncle who always judged him because his

uncle knew that it was something weird with him, when he commented “Oye hombre, I hope

you’re hungry for chicken soup” referring to womens, having sex and losing his dignity. The

author asks himself, “Why was my uncle so insistent on me having sex with this stranger...”

machismo is usually practiced by the men of the family who say that the only duty of men is to

have a slave woman who does everything for them at home. However, Edgar views that the

definition of machismo is ironic considering that pride is a word almost unanimously associated

with queer people, the enemy of machistas. Because of that, he lived in fear of showing his true

reality and being discriminated against by his own family. The unique way that makes him feel at

peace is that his mom accepted the way of how he was different to others. She doesn't know what

he was, she saw her son like a normal person because he was normal. It was nothing bad, she

was never disappointed about it, that’s why he was Mama’s boy.
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In conclusion, in this life where there are more educated and cultured people; that is to

say, life has modernized, and as people our minds have also not everything in life is the same,

something that people who remain in the past do not understand the way in which they currently

must act with dignity and respect. Since Central Americans say they are from different groups, it

has as a consequence about the attitudes of the other generations that are coming or even

currently these ones, and they could have a different education as well as different attitudes.

Being different is not bad if it does a person good both mentally and physically, which is what

we can basically contribute to our communities. Losing our values and education instead of

improving it would continue to affect our society anywhere in the world and making changes,

stopping being ignorant with an open mind would help our communities make good changes that

don't surprise people because it would see it as normal. In this case, as I said before about the

author Edgar Gomez, his situation was complicated because he went through experiences that

didn’t show who he was for society and how people think and view them. Adapting to new

changes around us to learn other cultures and ways of living is never bad as long as we represent

our roots wherever we go because that is what made us the people we are today.
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Works Cited

● Cortes Carranza, “ Central America Identities” Oxford University Press 2019.

● Lucila D. “Allá en Guatemala” University of Texas, San Antonio, the High School
Journal 2009.
● Edgar Gomez, “High Risk Homosexual” Soft Skull Press 2022.
● Robert A. Yarbrough, “Becoming Hispanic” in the “New South”: Central American
immigrants’ racialization experiences in Atlanta, GA, USA.