The Addition of Our Experiences

by Andrea Percic

“Where are you from?”

It’s a question that can hold more significance than we often realize.

For some, the answer is as simple as naming a city. For others, there may be more than one answer or no clear answer at all.

In some sense, Clara Villatoro was lucky that her family chose to stay in San Salvador. Born in 1984, she grew up in the midst of a civil war. Although she grew up under hostile circumstances, her identity as a Salvadoran was never called into question.

While her cousins were growing up in Los Angeles speaking English and engaging with American culture, Clara was immersed in Salvadoran life. Her family endured poverty during the war and violence occupied every corner of the small country, motivating many people to leave El Salvador in search of safer living conditions (Britannica). Even so, Clara’s parents chose to remain in San Salvador giving Clara firsthand experience with the country and culture in which her ancestors grew up.

In the early 80’s, during the beginning of the civil war that would officially span 12 years, her mother’s eight siblings decided to relocate their families to the US. This left Clara with only her immediate family and a small handful of extended family in San Salvador. This small support network was an essential aspect of Clara’s home in El Salvador and was crucial to the development of her own definition of ‘home’.

Although her cousins may have enjoyed some of the same Salvadoran dishes at their family dinner tables, they missed out on the community and culture of warmth that Clara described as some of the things she missed most after leaving El Salvador.

“I was missing food, music, obviously my family, friends, people being nice…”

She recounted her experience living in Spain to pursue graduate school as a time filled with constant reminders that she did not belong. In San Salvador, she was accustomed to frequently greeting people that she passed with a friendly “Buenos días,” but when she attempted to do the same in Spain, she was met with sharp retorts such as “why are you talking to me?”

Along with the changes in people, food, and places in her life, she was thrown into a culture that responded aggressively to her own. She quickly learned to change her greeting habits in order to blend in, but these sorts of experiences served as constant reminders that she did not belong.

As she continued to move around the world in pursuit of education and career opportunities. She found herself in many places far from her home country.

While her experiences with American culture sometimes lacked the warmth of her birth city, Clara found some comfort in the occasional connections she found to El Salvador. Whether that took form as Salvadoran people and Salvadoran pupusas (delicious cornmeal flatbread filled with cheese, beans and Chicharrón), or simply someone familiar with El Salvador, it was a vast improvement from the blank faces and confused looks she had received in Spain anytime she declared herself Salvadoran. Most of the people she encountered in Spain were clueless even to the existence of El Salvador.

Even though connections to her place of birth helped Clara feel at home during her time abroad, her friends and family were what truly allowed her to feel at home. Clara has felt little sentiment towards the physical locations where she spent her childhood and misses her family much more than her childhood home when she is away.

In a society where so many assumptions are made based on the answer to questions like “where are you from,” it’s worth noting that there often is much more to be learned from questions such as:

“What does ‘home’ mean to you?”

Her interpretation of home has allowed for the feeling of being at home to follow her around the world. It’s given her a willingness to incorporate American culture into her life via the formation of close friendships with people throughout the United States, allowing her to bring her sense of home with her wherever she goes.

Clara’s family in LA offered her a somewhat different experience with family and home. While there, she speaks Spanish with her aunts and uncles, and they talk about the changes between the El Salvador that they left and the one she sees often. While she recounted that certain aspects of Salvadoran culture such as food and language were present in her LA family, she also noted the substantial difference between herself and her cousins that had spent their entire lives in LA.

When commenting on the differences between her relationship with American culture and her cousins’ relationship with American culture, she remarked that “we are the addition of many experiences”.

Through this lens, her cousins’ experience living in LA meant that they lacked the same connection to El Salvador that Clara had formed during her early years. Although their parents were from El Salvador and they themselves were technically Salvadoran, many of them spoke little or no Spanish and had visited El Salvador only a handful of times or not at all. They were accustomed to some of the traditional foods that Clara associated with her birth city but had no concept of the culture of warmth that Clara described as being so central to her experiences in San Salvador.

This disconnect made Clara wonder about how different she would be if her parents had also chosen to relocate to LA. It also sparked a conversation with her cousin about identity and his experience as the son of an immigrant. Her cousin was born in the United States but expressed to her that he sometimes struggled to answer questions such as “where are you from?” because of the complex and somewhat confusing intersection between his heritage and his identity.

Clara recalled his description of this internal conflict in a comment he had made to her that “If someone asks me, I kind of doubt because I’m American, but not American. I’m part Salvadoran, but not really.” Having grown up in the US, he somewhat identified with being an American. However, at the same time he felt conflicted because of his Salvadoran heritage and the way in which his Salvadoran family was different than many other American families.

While at first, Clara’s parents’ decision to stay in El Salvador during the civil war when most of their extended family chose to leave seems surprising, it allowed Clara to have a strong grasp of her own identity.

As Clara mentioned in the final minutes of our interview, their choice to stay San Salvador meant that “One of the gifts [she has] is identity.” Without hesitation, Clara has the ability to definitively answer the question: “Where are you from?”. This gift is not accessible to everyone, and by recognizing that fact, Clara illustrates that home, rather than birth place, is a true indicator of identity.