The Importance Of My Identity

I wanted to be normal, but life was preparing me for something else. We are in a world which is divided in many ways such as gastronomies, countries, raze, continents, etc. Because of the prejudices and the stereotypes, we are obligated to find out who we are in the society. In most of the cases this identity is going to be determined by the place that we were born. However, what happens when we don’t fell identify with any culture or group? Do we have to accept the tags that this world has assigned to us? This happened to be my case. My identity is way more than a recompilation of stereotypes base on the world divisions; my identity is the essence of my personality that makes me who I am.

I am Wilson Pena, a twenty year old man. If you try to base my identity by my country or my skin color, you will have nothing else but a headache. I was born in Russia, but after two months my mother moved with me to Dominican Republic, and I grew up over there. My mother is Puerto Rican. My grandparents, on my dad side, were from the Middle East. Only that makes me a Russian, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Arabic, American boy. Hence, if we talk about the color that are inside of my genes, we’ll find another big mix. All these will tell you a lot about me, but not who I am.

Growing in Dominican Republic was not helpful in the task of recognizing myself. This is a country where racist behaviors doesn’t exist. It is a colorful place as most Dominicans are a mix between Africans, Tainos and Europeans. No Dominican look the same. However, there was something in my look that they recognized as anything but Dominican. To make it worse, when I was a kid I had and accident where I hit my head, and when I waked up I was talking totally different. According t...

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... cultural things that helps to define who I am was linked to. Now I was proud to be from there, and to say that I am Dominican.

To be proud of being Dominican doesn’t mean I will like everything about them. I will never like their food, or their music. On the other hand, the values that promotes their culture as accepting the others, and their hospitality, has been inculcated in my personality. May be, the country we are from doesn’t define who I am. However, it helped me to find some of the characteristics that makes me unique; like cooking, not wanting to eat Dominican food, I was forced to cook differently. I don’t know if I would be the same if I were raised in another country, but the true is that I don’t want to know. My mother says it was a mistake not taking me to Puerto Rico with her instead of Dominican Republic, I could not be happier that she didn’t.