Cultural Heritage, Authority, and Immigration.

I’ve been up to catching up with my reading. I’ve been taking up nineteenth century classics that I never got to read when I was in high school. I’ve been busy painting and listening to audio books in the process, so that when I look at my paintings they remind me of stories. I have been thinking about the meaning of the term cultural heritage and how it applies to migrant people. Are those English and North American classics that I've been reading part of my "cultural heritage"? Am I responsible for them and do I have the right to claim them as part of my background?

To the common citizen cultural background is taken for granted, but to the immigrant, cultural background becomes a responsibility and a construct. The common citizen is fed literature, art, and language automatically and systematically from his native environment all of his life. The immigrant brings a personalized idea of what his cultural background is and adjusts it to his new surrounding in an attempt to comply with new political expectations. Part of this process of integration requires an understanding of the new environment: Language is a good example for without a basic understanding of a local language an immigrant will always be marginalized by default. Other idiosyncrasies and knowledge modified during this process are taste, mannerisms, and vocabulary. All of these plus the tangible artifacts left by past generations are considered a culture's heritage.

Statement For The Gold of Your Horizons.

My current project consists in the partial obliteration of objects that are fundamental to the construction of a cultural identity. Examples of these are memorabilia, cultural or religious figures (including mythological, folkloric, historical, or artistic icons) and prehistoric or ancient artifacts that aid in the invention of an ancestral past.

How important are these objects (or subjects) in the long run? How easy or how difficult is it to forget them? The poporo, a Muisca statuette, the Tahíno words in my vocabulary: patata, tiburón, maíz, bohío; and the Arabic ones: algarroba, aceite, limón, arroz. Do we remember the functions of these tokens accurately or do we construct them? Do we modify them to fit our ideologies or even our tastes? Am I entitled to my mother’s memories? Do I inherit my past or do I reinvent it? How does collective memory function? These are questions that I ask myself constantly.