Hispanic/Latin@ Diversity and Identity
A new paradigm
By Ligia Lundine

What does being Hispanic/Latin@ mean to us? When it comes time to express who we are, the richness of our culture is evident more than ever. In this quest for answers to this question, ¿Qué Pasa, OSU? has invited members of the Hispanic/Latin@ community at Ohio State to speak about the community’s diversity and identity. Instead of writing an article about what we think Hispanic/Latin@ diversity encompasses, we decided to open the door to opinions and explore a very complex issue. But complexity is not necessarily bad, as long as we are willing to transcend the barriers of our own definitions and characterizations to embrace the views of others. Hopefully, we enrich our own, or at least, understand our differences.

This is an ambitious goal, but we firmly believe that in our journey toward progress in this country and elsewhere, the Hispanic/Latin@ community has a unique opportunity. In this university alone, a group of people with heritage or direct descent from more than 26 countries can find interests in common: sharing stories, language, food, traditions and music as well as research and scholarly interests and opportunities.

How we identify ourselves will depend upon our own personal experiences. In my case, after growing up and living most of my life in Guatemala, my identity has been influenced by a country where 24 different ethnic groups collide in a relatively small territory (108,889 km²). More recently, as a bi-racial couple settled in Columbus, my husband John (who was raised in Ohio) and I have enriched our lives and the lives of our families within a new paradigm. This new paradigm is constructed with two languages, two cultures and two sets of stories. As we move forward to unravel the challenges this paradigm presents for us, we hope to find a convergence among the best of our cultures. Last quarter, while doing research for my thesis, I came across the scientific term “edge effect” that describes this dynamic in an interesting way. Some researchers¹ have hypothesized that the interaction between diverse social groups creates a process of interchange or cultural “edge effect” that can be compared with the “edge effect” of ecosystems, in which ecological edges show evidence of high levels of productivity and species prosperity or biodiversity. In other words, a diverse environment seems to promote productivity more than a homogenous one.

In science, some researchers find themselves trying to break out of paradigms so as to apply a specific term to encapsulate a set of beliefs, assumptions, values, traditions and practices in order to describe a way of viewing reality.² Whatever the new paradigm we create for the Hispanic/Latin@ community at Ohio State, I hope our commonalities transcend our differences and that the “edge effect” of our environment helps us reach the maximum levels of productivity and prosperity.

_______________________________________
¹Turner, J., Davidson-Hunt, I. J., O’Flaherty, M. (2003). “Living on the Edge: Ecological and Cultural Edges as Sources of Diversity for Social-Ecological Resilience.” Human Ecology. 31 (3): 439-461

²Source: www.dictionary.com 2005.