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.

The immigrant then has an opportunity to choose what to inherit from his new home but will be faced with the inevitable consequences of being an alien. As an alien one has no right to claim authority over local cultural heritage. Or does one? If so, how long does it take then to become naturalized? Ten years? Twenty? Three generations?

It really comes down to persuasion. In order to exist freely, the immigrant struggles to get out of a sector designated for him by his host society. Transcending that spot does not mean camouflage. The immigrant adapts when he has found a way to incorporate all aspects of his experience into a perfectly constructed identity, and since he will be prone to interrogations, language is the most important tool. To belong to a culture means to be able to understand and to communicate it successfully without having to rely on another for comparison. Or better yet, to belong to a culture means to be able to perform it. If the immigrant relies on his past experiences or on his experiences as an immigrant to discuss culture, he will never have the right to exercise authority over it for he will always marginalize himself by his otherness.