Identity, Occupation, and Environment

In many ways, I think my generation in the United States has become obsessed with the idea of authenticity, identity, and the true self. I am not sure exactly why this preoccupation has emerged within my age group, and one could speculate reasons regarding many things, both negative and positive like narcissism, historical context, or even a reaction to a consumerist and wasteful culture. Whichever may be the cause, we have seen the emergence of identity seekers shape the environment and occupations of our society into a young generation that values local beers, "alternative" lifestyles, nuanced or sometimes new aged religious beliefs, and diversity. Our identities, our true selfs, emerge from the interaction between our agency and the environment around us, occupation. Our occupations become integral to the expression of our identity, acting as the means through which we create our persona in this world.

I am laying on a blanket in a park in Cincinnati with my shirt off, reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed with a friend playing Arcade Fire songs on her guitar next to me. These activities relate to and facilitate an identity for myself both in my mind and the minds of others, a university educated, urban living, male in the United States.

I sit in a coffee shop with another student discussing our shared experience in Nicaragua and the merits of fair trade products and the potential pitfalls of genetically modified organisms. An identity emerges through this engagement, a traveled, cultured, socially aware global citizen.

These occupations, the ways that we live our lives, create an identity that our generation believes is deeply rooted in the authenticity of the soul, the true human essence.

As I spent the past week and a half here in Guatemala, I have realized that there is both a lasting truth and deceitful lie intertwined with this true self concept. As I have walked through the streets of Antigua, spoke with locals, and simply sat in the park, I have found a forced identity shift because of the changes in what I am doing and environment in which I am doing it.

I sit modestly dressed, with a backpack sitting next to me, camera hidden within, taking notes on a bench in Central Park. In that moment, no matter what, my white skin, height, clothing, and my lack of a native routine will always connect me to my identity as a visitor, a foreigner. This identity is forced to the surface of every unclear interaction, unfamiliar exchange, or even passing glance. In the United States, I may have thought of myself as alternative or slightly outside the mainstream, yet here I am far from the most alternative gringo who walks barefoot in the street with Aladdin-like pants, a tie die tank top, dreadlocks, and a guitar slung around his back. I am foreign, white, and most usually expected to not speak Spanish and never expected to speak any of the 23 native languages.

Here in Guatemala, my environment has had a profound impact on what I do and how I do it which therefore has had a noticeable impact on my perception of my own identity. But is this such a bad thing, to be forced to reform and reassess my identity within this new context, new environment. Some in my generation might claim travesty that the Guatemalan context simplifies me to a white foreigner, most likely "helping" poor Guatemalans through a mission trip.  People my age might say I am being unfairly pigeonholed into an identity that isn't "truly" me.

Is it not? Is this white, middle class, man, taking notes and pictures here in Guatemala not who I "truly" am. Well, like I said, this is both a truth and a lie. As much as my generation might want it to be, I have come to realize, our identity is not like a stone sitting in a river, being moved or thrown about, chipped our smoothed on the surface but with an unchanging, unbending core. We are not the same in every environment with which we interact.

We are much more like a toy box, filled with many different identities, both small and large, some of which have drifted toward the bottom. The identities that lie on the surface, just as you open our lid, depend on what the person who you are engaging with most usually plays with and toys you make most easily found. Your environment through your occupations within it, often pulls to the surface the part of your identity that it most wants, sometimes taking just what is on top, and sometimes digging deep into the parts of ourselves with which we have never engaged. We are always changing, reorganizing, and reinventing the identities within our selfs to interact with the world. We might be able to maintain a static identity if we did not do anything, however to be human is to occupy our time, to do, to be, and to be alive. Our identity is something richer, deeper, and more fluid than a simple label or a single story.

So yes, I am a university educated, urban living, male as well as a somewhat traveled, generally socially aware person. However, part of my identity is also simply a white person from the United States who is visiting Guatemala for a short time. This is no more or less authentically part of who I am and becoming aware of that fact may inform and enrich how I go about engaging with this new context. Understanding what that newly emerging identity means for my place here in Guatemala challenges me to understand how I fit into this contextual puzzle, if I am, as Frank Kronenberg would say, "doing well with" the Guatemalan people.

Recognizing the many parts of my identity through the things that I do every day, being aware of them, and understanding their relationship to the world around me will help me to better understand how I can use the many toys in my toy box to support change toward justice in our world. Being aware the many facets of my being will better equip me to relate, engage, and be open to the people and experiences waiting for me in the world. Our generation has clung to the idea that we each have an single unchanging truth that runs in the core of our being, and that may be true in some ways, however our identity and the occupations associated with it are malleable, changing, things that allow us to disconnect and connect with our world.

We are part of the world around us, shaping and being shaped by it. We exist with our world, not in spite of it and our occupations help us discover what that existence looks like and means.