Rory McAllister / Argentina
My son made an odd statement the other day. He said “we’re Argentine and Irish.” I can’t recall the context for the statement or why he said it, but it forced me to open the discussion with him about what we were and why. Being a history teacher (and therefore a collector of odd and occasionally irrelevant facts), I took the opportunity to tell my son a story. I told him how there were really only two major places the boats went when our ancestors left Ireland during The Famine. One was New York, and the other was Buenos Aires. Many chose to go to Argentina instead because at the time it presented as much opportunity as the United States did though it did not turn out that way for Argentina in the long run. Because the Irish arrived in a foreign land, they banded together and really didn’t intermarry--at least in my ancestry. Murphys, Kellys, McAllisters, and so on all had their clan-like relationships transported from the Old World to the New and seemed to stay pretty separate for at least a time. My family had been in Argentina about 110 years before emigrating to the Cuba and then the United States as political refugees from the rise of Castro’s communist state (oh the stories he had!) As a result of being essentially transient, my dad’s family had a curious mix of intermingling cultural identities but certainly rooted in being Irish. Though my dad spoke Spanish first and still does quite well (most Spanish speakers think he’s Cubano because of his accent) he never really identified as anything other than American largely because of his (and his father’s) disdain for Castro, Che Guevara, and the Perons in Argentina and because any Irish culture had not been transmitted in his family. On the other hand, my mother strongly identified as an Irish Catholic (altogether different from Irish Protestant). Since my dad never really cared about any particular culture, I was inculcated into this Irish American sort of thinking that became my cultural identity. In my adult life, I can pass for having Irish ancestry and that’s about it. I realize that in many ways I am a cultural SoCal kid with some influences from interesting places. If anything, this strange melange of cultures in my history has given me an appreciation for diversity and I hope to teach my sons the same. I guess the lesson in this is that you make your own identity--especially when your ancestry is so muddled. The American experiment has made that muddling such a reality that we are, in my own estimation, in uncharted territory in cultural identity and awareness. I may very well be wrong there, but it’s the only way I can make sense of what I am and where I come from. What sort of culture do I belong to when there are so many that have influenced who I am? I can accept them all, one, or none--but in any case, it is me who creates the identity.