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Social Media is Collectivist
By Mari D. González
Whenever I hear advice on the best use of social media to attract users, I go back to my introduction to cross-cultural communication graduate course.
In collectivist (Latin America, Arab countries, Southern Europe) as opposed to individualist (U.S., Northern Europe) cultural groups, social media is intuitive. People in collective cultures are group-oriented. Their self-identity is directly related to their group or groups of reference. They thrive by being sensitive to the group’s harmony. For members of collectivist societies, communication with one another is frequent and spontaneous. Because language is a reflection of culture, one might say that Spanish-speakers tend to be more social. Collectivist cultures as opposed to task-oriented or individualist cultures understand that in social media:
- Broadcasting is not conversation.
- Two-way communication is conversation.
- People can tell who is not being genuine.
- Unless you are a broadcaster, social media is about the quality not the quantity.
- Conversations require three steps – listening, processing information, and responding.
- Conversations and meaningful engagement are time consuming.
- Time is not necessarily money and relationships take you further than money.
As an interculturalist or intercultural communications professional, my focus is on what happens when people from two different cultural groups or different enculturation, i.e., staff at U.S. companies, whose values are dominant, and Latinos communicate, assuming they are using the same language–English and/or Spanish. In essence, my interest is in studying how the speaker’s message is received and interpreted by the listener according to contextual meanings that are intrinsic to her or his early socialization.
Edited by Connie Cobb
Being Latino on Facebook
An Interview with Lance Rios
By Mari D. González
In preparation for my independent study research proposal on Social Media and cultural indicators, I interviewed Lance Rios, creator and administrator of Facebook’s Being Latino.
I became fascinated by Lance’s ability to attract a wealth of followers –“31,576 People Like This” as of today, to keep them engaged, and to maintain consistent and personalized contact with them. All of his posts are culturally relevant and promote individual opinions and collective discussion. Thirteen percent or 18 out of my 138 Facebook friends joined Being Latino after I suggested it.
How Does He Manage It?
Lance is a young English-speaking and bicultural blogger and social media addict –as he describes himself. He is of Puerto Rican descent and both his Latino cultural background and American values are alive and communicated throughout his posts.
He resonates with acculturated English-speaking Latinos across the board –Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Central American and South American. His posts range from informational and serious activism to entertaining on American popular culture, national news from Latin America, politics, statistics, biographies and other socio-cultural topics.
When I asked him about the role of Being Latino, he humbly replied, “It is something I created [which has] attracted a lot of people via word of mouth and it is bigger than I anticipated.”
Being Latino vs. Lance Rios
Lance recognizes that it is more effective to tone down individual views and reserve those for his personal page, “I’m more balanced, neutral, and less biased on Being Latino. I wanted to separate [myself from it]. It is not about me.”
Concurrently, he wants people to know that although Being Latino is an “open platform” he is behind the page by personally approaching people “who had their own agenda.”
Cultural Relevance – What Makes Being Latino, Latino
Being Latino has filled a huge gap in mass media communications with a conventional social media platform. There isn’t media that communicates to bicultural and acculturated Latinos. “Most media outlets use Spanish language” which doesn’t echo with American-born Latinos. Being Latino caters to “second- and third-generation Latinos” not only in the U.S. but also in Europe, South Africa and Latin America.
American-born Latinos have been raised in an English-speaking world surrounded by American media which unfortunately neither represents nor includes them. They are the majority, as compared to foreign-born, and prefer speaking English; yet, they also choose to unassimilate by continually sharing and communicating certain cultural values on- and off-line.
Lance recognizes that “[his] audience is more comfortable with Spanglish and English,” which speaks of their upbringing. Culturally relevant elements are communicated in the language that is more fitting. Spanglish is used for what cannot be translated without losing connotation, “I never spoke [Spanish] growing up; everything was in English, [except] certain words with meanings that cannot be transferred, [such as] words used in normal conversations [and] those words are identifiers and connectors.”
I do not consider myself another social media addict, however I am becoming addicted to Being Latino.
Why Facebook?
[To be continued].
Ethnifying Class Part II: A Personal Experience
By Mari D González
Last summer, I presented at the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) conference held at UC Berkeley and one of the participants asked me at the end, “How do you feel about presenting when most of your fellow Mexicans are labor workers?”
I wishfully thought he had come across post-colonial studies given that he was a university professor abroad. I had overheard him talking about teaching a graduate course in Thailand. My assumptions resulted from a positive stereotype that is just as insidious.
I did not care to answer his question because it was not one I would have ever asked myself. Instead, I wondered if he, in the effort of protecting his ego, avoided asking: “How do I feel by listening to a Mexican given the unquestioned perception I have chosen to hold about her?”
My “Mexicaness” experience has been shaped by a series of life events. I did not grow up in the U.S. and thus was devoid of its color-classification through enculturation. Growing up in Mexico, I mingled and felt equally comfortable with my well-off relatives from Mexico City as with my father’s students at his materially-poor-but-dignifying-rich rural school where I attended first and second grades before entering the only private school in my hometown. I certainly could not have any sympathy for this professor’s views or feelings.
Yet, through his inquiry, he had informed me of his narrow individually-held perception and how he declined to challenge it by diffusing it toward me. He refused to expand his stereotype when he had the opportunity to. Unfortunately, he chose to see the little and tiny side of the broader whole despite of his long-traveled and -lived life.
Ethnifying Class Part I: Classifying Obsession
By Mari D. González
Our Legacy from Colonialism
Because our most forceful legacy from colonialism —color obsession— is widely represented in media and pop culture and supported during children’s enculturative years, our tendencies are rather simplistic. We wish we could accurately match someone’s ethnicity and/or skin color with a socioeconomic class.
The effort to classify what a person looks like, her skin color, her ethnicity and culture, and/or her country of origin as her socioeconomic status leads more than often to wrong assumptions, sad stories, and violent acts.
When one’s nationality or looks mismatches what the perceiver expects in her character or behavior, a need for logical explanation never delays. The work of the “I” is to rely on our reasoning when our old-held perceptions are challenged. Yet, verbally expressed inaccurate and overstated generalizations are always obvious to the receiver but usually dismissed by the messenger.
“But, you don’t look Mexican”
Phrases such as, “But, you don’t look Mexican” informs us where the speaker comes from —a solid and steadily held ignorance. That comfortable internal bubble gets burst as the messenger desires to be, but is not, asserted. His wish-it-was-iron-made fizz is held. He does not have to look inside to begin to accept that he does also carry that human-shared misery of pain.
Or, perhaps, he had wished that I wished to separate myself from my group of reference as much as he can comfortably separate himself from what he sees as “other.” And this other in his eyes is usually darker, indigenous-looking, lives on the other side of the tracks, has not appropriately learned the common fake politeness, was conditioned to obey, follows orders, rarely confronts authority, has less social status and in turn less political power.
According to those narrow “ethnicity-equals-class” standards, I must not, could not, and should not be Mexican. A fine gentleman, with the experience of being “of color,” told me once, “It is because according to them, you are too intelligent and good looking to be Mexican.”
I rather think that it is my lighter skin and middle-class demeanor what makes commentators like him feel unthreatened and almost sure that I want to climb their socially-imposed hierarchical ladder at the expense of my self-perceived identity and of the connection with the people I relate to culturally, historically, and ethnically.
The Identity of Blended People from Mexico to the U.S.
By Mari D. Gonzalez
1810-2010: Identity of Blended People
The more blended people in the Southern Hemisphere of America began the tedious task of being named, boxed, and “other-ed” by their settlers five centuries ago. Mexican as a nationality came about exactly two centuries ago when “La Nueva España” gained independence in 1810 and it named itself Mexico after its indigenous roots.
There wasn’t neither a country named Mexico nor “Mexicans” before then. The process for Mexicans to develop their own cultural identity began with the Mexican Revolution and culminated with La Epoca de Oro, The Golden Era, of cinema in the 1950’s and with the amazing proliferation of world-class visual art by icons such as Khalo, Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco who exposed a rather dignifying Mexican working class and their popular culture.
Mexicans, as any other labeled people, do not represent a particular classification but “una amalgama” between the already ethnically diverse Spaniards whose background could have been Arabic, Jew, Celt, or other from that well-mixed Southern region; slaves from Africa; and the local indigenous peoples.
“Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds”
Latin Americans, as did Latin Europeans, continue to mix and blend. According to scholar and historian Gregory Rodriguez’ (2007) research reported on his book “Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America,” the majority of second- and third-generation Latinos marry outside their own ethnicity.
Latinos, people with origins in Latin America, have already gone through what this country is about to. This census year, the task of boxing people, who from the beginning of history have blended despite legal, religious, and social limitations, will be incommensurable.
Hopefully, this tediousness will prompt us to give up classifying people solely on physical appearance.
IXMATI 