Though Hispanic Heritage month ended Oct. 15, community members said the reality of being Latinx plays a pivotal role in their identities and experiences — both within their own community and in predominately white spaces such as Pepperdine.
The term “Hispanic” refers to someone who was born, or descends from, a Spanish-speaking country, while the term “Latinx” refers to someone who was born, or descends from, a Latin American country, according to Exploratorium.
Communication Professor Diana Martinez was born in Ecuador and emigrated to the United States with her family when she was 6 years old. Finding her identity in being Ecuadoran and a U.S. immigrant was challenging, she said.
“Being Latino is a process and it doesn’t have to be complete any one day,” Martinez said. “As a matter of fact, that incompleteness is part of the experience, us searching for identity.”
For Hispanic and Latinx students and staff, finding their identity and searching for belonging hasn’t always been easy, they said. But, as they have learned more about their culture and their history, a sense of pride has overcome them, and they said they have learned to love and celebrate their identities.
Wrestling With Identity and Fighting for Belonging
As a daughter of immigrants, senior Priscilla Gonzalez said her parents instilled in her a deep sense of pride for her Mexican heritage.
Despite this pride, there is a sense of yearning for belonging that is unique for children of immigrants, Gonzalez said. She has found herself in a tug-of-war between two identities.
“The identity of being Mexican American gets lost,” Gonzalez said. “[There’s] a constant need of trying to fit into a culture that you can’t fully fit into.”
Sophomore Thalia Markowski is Polish, Russian, German and Jewish on her dad’s side and Puerto Rican and Venezuelan on her mom’s side. Having mixed heritage, Markowski said finding confidence in her identity was a challenge.
“It’s a constant juggle between the two identities,” Markowski said.
With her thick, curly hair and tan skin, Markowski said she always noticed she was different from the rest of her family and her friends at school.
Daniel Rodriguez, Religion and Hispanic Studies professor, as well as the divisional dean for the Religion and Philosophy Department, said he has found a lot of young Latino Americans feel both their parent cultures have rejected them.
Rodriguez said he has seen this play out in his own life when Americans ask him where he’s from, despite living in the States his whole life, and when Mexicans immediately point out that he is not one of them.
As a third-generation Latino of Mexican ancestry, Rodriguez said he grew up in a predominantly Latinx community in Pico Rivera in L.A. County and then moved to Fresno at the age of 16.
“[It] was a shock in many ways, but was the best thing that ever happened to me in some ways,” Rodriguez said. “It was when I first realized that I was a minority.”
Once Rodriguez started his family, he moved to Mexico and lived there for nine years. During his time there, he said he felt like an outsider as a Mexican-American. In the first two years, Rodriguez said he often asked God why he was sent there.
“God said, ‘You need to understand the idiosyncrasies of your people,'” Rodriguez said. “‘You need to understand where you came from, culturally, linguistically, spiritually. You need to understand it.’”
Rodriguez said his experience in Mexico prepared him to support Latinx students who wrestle with their identity.
A common misconception among the Latinx community, students and staff said, is that there are certain requirements one has to meet to claim to be Latinx.
“Why are there criteria for [Latinidad]?” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez said that being Latinx is more than checking off boxes, it’s a learning process.
“It makes it so hard for people to feel like they belong in that identity,” Gonzalez said. “It’s like they don’t belong anywhere.”
For Markowski, those markers were a high tolerance for spicy food and speaking Spanish fluently. She said because she doesn’t meet these expectations, she often feels like she isn’t allowed to call herself Latina.
“I don’t feel enough,” Markowski said.
For Gonzalez, having Spanish as her first language and being fluent in it is a way for her to connect to her culture, but has brought its own set of challenges.
Gonzalez said her primary school placed her in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, separating her from the rest of her peers. From a young age, she was often the translator during parent-teacher conferences, which she said forced her to grow up faster than everyone around her.
“It was a lot of things that wouldn’t happen in a typical childhood,” Gonzalez said. “But I also wouldn’t have it any other way because it made me who I am.”
Gonzalez said growing up in a predominantly white community, she was always aware that she was different from her peers.
Martinez recalls the moment she realized there was a whole other language outside of Spanish that she didn’t know but would have to learn to live in the States.
“I went from a space where I felt like I was the same level intellectually and socially with my peers, versus having been in a situation where all of a sudden [I was] worried that people would see me as unintelligent [because I didn’t speak the language,]” Martinez said.
Martinez said she often wrestled with both her Ecuadoran heritage and her desire to assimilate into American culture but realized the two identities could coexist.
“You are 100% whole and 100% good exactly as you were created and as you speak and as you engage with the world,” Martinez said.
The Latinx Experience at Pepperdine
Coming to Pepperdine magnified the feeling of being an “other,” Gonzalez said.
“And you notice it not just in your peers but in faculty,” Gonzalez said. “Sometimes you’ll get into more difficult topics and you feel like everyone is staring at you or everyone is walking on eggshells.”
Gonzalez said the lack of diversity within Pepperdine faculty and staff is disappointing. As a Hispanic Studies major, Gonzalez said she’s enjoyed learning about her history, but finds it ironic that the professors teaching her don’t share that history.
Latinx people in higher education are like “unicorns,” Rodriguez said.
“One of the things that I wish changed — and it’s more challenging, so extremely challenging to change — is diversifying the faculty,” Rodriguez said. “It is much, much, much harder than diversifying students.”
Applicants have the odds stacked against them, Rodriguez said. Various factors like living expenses in Malibu, expectations of simultaneously conducting research and publishing and income push candidates toward other opportunities.
“There are some internal challenges that compete [against] those really good qualified people who are of color and who embrace our mission,” Rodriguez said.
While Rodriguez acknowledges there is much room for Pepperdine to improve in diversifying its community, when comparing his time as a student to now being a professor at Pepperdine, he said he’s proud of how far the University has come.
“I got here and it wasn’t the school that it is now,” Rodriguez said.
As a student, Rodriguez, came to Pepperdine in 1975 after attending a junior college in Fresno. He said he was the first ever Latinx vice president of the Student Government Association. He said he takes pride in Latinx students succeeding and holding positions of influence on campus.
Because of the small Hispanic/Latinx community at Pepperdine, Martinez said it is important for Latinx faculty to come together to support the Latinx student body.
“[We need to be] finding ways to find each other on campus and go to events and show up and be there to celebrate milestones,” Martinez said.
Being at Pepperdine, Markowski said she doesn’t always feel accepted. Markowski said it’s been a challenge to feel a sense of belonging on campus and in London — where she is studying abroad for the 2023-24 academic year — because of the difficulty finding fellow Puerto Ricans and Venezualans.
“It’s been an interesting experience, [trying] to feel whole and to feel at home,” Markowski said.
In times like this, where Latinos find themselves in predominantly white spaces, Martinez said it is important for people to search for ways they can fill their “cultural tank,” to feel a sense of belonging. She said it is a beautiful thing to show up in a space that feels familiar and where one feels accepted in who they are.
To combat the feelings of isolation, Markowski said she’s searched for community through other aspects of her identity, specifically her religious identity. She said she’s found a diverse Christian community on campus that has fed her desire for culture.
“I’ve met so many different people [in the Latino diaspora] through church and that’s what’s been grounding me most of all in feeling secure as an outsider to California, as an outsider to Malibu,” Markowski said.
Gonzalez believes Pepperdine should do more to celebrate students’ cultures. She said it’s discouraging to see that the Latinx Student Alliance is the only group on campus hosting events for Hispanic Heritage Month and wishes the University at large would do more to include Latinx students.
“Why isn’t anyone asking us for our opinions, or what they could do better, or how to welcome us more into this space?” Gonzalez said. “Because we’re very clearly here and we belong just as much as anyone else.”
The Graphic reached out to the Office for Community Belonging but did not get a response in time for publication.
Gonzalez studied abroad in Buenos Aires during the 2022 spring semester and said she felt a deeper sense of belonging there than in Malibu. She said it was encouraging to see students embrace a Latino culture because she had never seen that on the Malibu campus.
“I was with Pepperdine students who were embracing a Latino culture, who were embracing the Spanish language,” Gonzalez said. “They [students] were more open-minded and willing to accept this part of the world and these different cultures.”
Passing Down Culture to Future Generations
As immigrants, Martinez’s family needed to figure out how to assimilate to American culture while still maintaining their Ecuadoran culture, Martinez said.
“Looking back and connecting the dots, I actually realized how much we were really holding on to [our culture] and able to pass on [the culture],” Martinez said.
Gonzalez feels responsible for passing down her culture to her children one day, she said.
“I’m the generation that can stop it [the passage of culture] and that’s so scary,” Gonzalez said. “It’s a burden that I feel to have to carry on the culture. And I want to, but it’s a lot.”
Though daunting, Martinez said she has made it her mission to be intentional in passing down her culture to her children — such as relating topics her children are learning in school to parts of Ecuadoran culture.
Martinez wanted to enroll her son in a dual language school as a means of maintaining that part of her heritage, she said.
Martinez has found success in passing down her culture to her children. She said hearing her children proclaim their identity as Ecuadoran brings her joy.
“I want them [my kids] to maintain their culture,” Martinez said. “Language is a part of that.”
Celebrating Who We Are
Holidays are a special time for many Latinx students and staff because it’s a time where they said they participate in cultural traditions. For Gonzalez, Christmas Eve is a special day because that’s when her family’s celebrations take place, as opposed to on Dec. 25, she said.
Markowski’s favorite family holiday tradition, she said, is making a Puerto Rican dish called “pasteles.” Pasteles are banana-leaf treats made of masa filled with meat and vegetables, according to Delish Dlites. When making pasteles, Markowski said each family member has a specific role.
“It’s [the pasteles] a gift,” Markowski said. “The fact that we all had our hands on the same meal was so special.”
A family tradition she loves is watching the Puerto Rican Day Parade. Growing up in New York — the city with the second highest population of Puerto Ricans, according to Lehman College — Markowski said it was easy for her to find people who shared the same culture as her.
“[My family gets] super hype and [we] like waiving our flags and screaming at the television when we see people we love and know,” Markowski said. “I feel like [the parade] is a very New York thing.”
Markowski said she loves celebrating her Latinx culture and takes pride in being both “Boricua,” or Puerto Rican, and Venezuelan.
Every year in September during the week of Mexican Independence Day, Gonzalez said her family would take a trip to Mexico. The city her parents grew up in would hold a celebration filled with carnival games and traditional food.
Gonzalez also said, being in Malibu, she misses all the Mexican food her mom makes and wishes there were places nearby where she can taste a piece of home.
“That has definitely been the hardest being away from home because I can’t make what my mom makes,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez’s mom also exposed her to a lot of traditional Mexican music growing up, and Gonzalez said it’s nostalgic for her. Gonzalez listens to this music whenever she is missing home.
Like Gonzales, Markowski said she connects with her culture through music.
“We know how to commune, we know how to make music, we know how to dance,” Markowski said. “There’s something very special about a shared experience of all growing up in a similar way.”
Being multicultural, Markowski said she’s found joy and pride in tracing back her roots and pinpoint all the places and people she came from.
“It’s not a singular identity, it’s not a monolith,” Markowski said. “Being Latino is an amalgamation of so many different cultures and perspectives and parts of the world.
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Follow the Graphic on Twitter: @PeppGraphic
Email Yamillah Hurtado: yamillah.hurtado@pepperdine.edu
