My grandmother, Dolores, is 94 years young. She can be strongest even when she's being sweet. She is a classy lady, but she can also make a sailor blush with the bluest of humor.
Her dual nature comes from the experience of living through a spectrum of multicultural worlds. In the 1930s, my grandmother grew up in the heart of Oakland. She was raised by a Mexican mother and a Jewish-Hungarian father. My family forged a multi-religious and multicultural identity with my grandmother's birth. My grandmother always told me her parents gave her the choice of what cultural identity she felt compelled to.
At that moment, she was never forced to choose an identity and was given the space always to be herself. When she talks about her life, it is apparent she lived in two cultural worlds, Jewish and Mexican American, but if you asked her, she identifies as an "Oakland Gal."
For me, this approach to identity was a great blessing growing up. Being a part of a spectrum of cultural experiences was never more apparent in our family than around the holidays. We honored almost every cultural history of my family through holiday traditions. I grew up attending the Menorah lighting at San Francisco's Union Square and the midnight Christmas Catholic mass. For our holiday meal, we ate latkes and tamales. This experience set a precedent for me that all kinds of identity come to us as a vast, beautiful spectrum. We all share a human story, yet we all forge our paths between the stories that have come before us.
