We Don’t All Do Family
My childhood taught me family can be a dangerous place.
Recently I participated in a windows-and-mirrors event. This is an exercise that arranges the participants in two concentric circles. The inner circle seats people who answer questions and the outer circle seats those who bear witness silently.
It gives those in the inner circle a chance to share a specific experience and those in the outer circle a chance to learn. The windows-and-mirrors event I participated in was a group of Latinos discussing how our culture has affected our lives. We answered questions about how many generations of our family have lived in the U.S. and how we feel about our heritage language (for us it was Spanish).
It was a wonderful experience that gave me a chance to explain how I feel about being Mexican, and to do it in the context of listening to others talk about how they felt about being Puerto Rican or Honduran or Argentinian or Cuban (out of six, only two of us were Mexican).
But the most interesting thing for me happened before the event. A few of us had a windows-and-mirrors meeting to prepare the questions we’d answer, and one of the…
