Cultural Capital

A kid at my job was sitting behind me earlier this week. And after messing up his computer clean up by accidentally pulling a plug, I tried engaging what seemed like an otherwise friendly dude in conversation. For some reason, my code switching kicked in, and this reason is not unknown to me. I tend to code switch depending on who I am talking to. But, often, when the actual switching of codes happens in front of the person I'm speaking differently to, the results are usually relatively awkward.

[Like the time I was saying good-bye to a friend by over-pronouncing all of my r's as I would speak to most of my college friends, and my proper good-bye got intercepted by a dude in Central Square saying,  'Ey yo, what up,'
And I, in my many years of experience with getting hit on in Central Square, just said,
'Wud up,'  which, in turn, elicited an awkward response:  'Why you talkin' like that all the sudden?'
 Ah! Cuz I adapt how I sound to who I'm talking to and I'm a confused bi-product of a multicultural context.]

So my slang kicked in at the office and the computer kid said,

                "Please don't use that word ever again."

 He says this with a sense of authority, as if he is the slang-keeper, holding the authority to approve or deny the use of slang terms to anyone he deems incompetent. And worst of all, he says this to me as if I'm some suburban white person trying to impress him or something.  No offense to suburban white people, but that's just not who I am. And if I was, I would be writing a whole other post about the socially acceptable uses of certain terms and how who one is affects how well these terms are received.

      Well, the conversation doesn't end here. He proceeds to challenge how Dominican I am, asking me to "say something in Spanish."
"You were born here?"
"Yes," I respond.
"Then you're American. Say something in Spanish, you probably can't speak it."

And here I am sitting in my cubicle with my pencil skirt and button down blouse, with client files stacked next to me, listening to this kid in baggy jeans with a modern day jerry curl challenge me to a cultural match, reminiscent of High School "yo' mama battles.'

        I ignore it because...why wouldn't I? I'm done with my friendly attempt at conversation. This has now stepped into a realm I am not willing to engage.

        My coworker happens to pass by, addressing me in Spanish, to which I respond in Spanish. And of course, he says: "See, you're not Dominican. You don't speak Spanish."
Ummm ok.... I ignore.

He proceeds to educate me about said Dominican spanish and explains, "See, you have to know about el tigeraje..." Now, tigeraje is actually not used correctly in this sentence. Tigeraje refers to street smarts, which he meant to use in order to explain that if I did not speak with Dominican slang I surely wasn't Dominican.

      Although the encounter is laughable, it left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and with questions about our perceptions of people. Granted, I was born in the United States and went to a private college. But had he known my background, would he have treated me this way and questioned me so intensely? Had he seen me in a context other than my work environment where my language sounds different, would he have received my switch into slang as defensively as he did?

     Of course I was not going to speak Dominican slang in the office, because 1. I'm in an office setting, which requires a certain degree of professionalism.2. I was not born in a rural town outside of the city in Dominican Republic, I was born in Cambridge.  And 3.  The Spanish I know as my first language comes from a family that is relatively proper.

    Had he known that our backgrounds were probably not that different-that my mom was a single parent, that I grew up in project housing, that graffiti intrigued me as a 14 year old and that I was part of a rap group throughout my adolescence, known as the girl that raps; that I read Source magazine and followed the East Coast-West coast battle long before he was born (represented by Tupac and Biggie); that I cried when The Lox and Faith Evans sang We'll Always Love Big Papa--would this encounter have panned out differently? But listing my credentials is a waste of breath in this situation. The only reason I list them here is to get at a larger point: We assume things about people, especially when it has to do with culture. We use our "cultural capital" to lord over others sometimes, like-

"I grew up in the projects, my big brother is in the Latin Kings, my cousin snorts coke and my mother left me when I was two, what about you?"

Someone in this situation is not lamenting their childhood nor projecting their feelings of brokenness here. They are, in fact, gloating in a self-aggrandizing manner because the culture affirms this kind of background as evidence of cultural badges of honor.
     And this attitude is not limited to people growing up in an urban context. I see this in suburbia all the time. Take the all too familiar post-Gordon party, for instance, I hear conversations like this often:

-"I went to community college for six months, so I was totally in shock when I went to Gordon," says the blonde kid from New Hampshire whose family is Republican, as he ostentatiously smokes a cigarette and blurts out the word "sex" every five minutes.
-"Six months!" Cries the other. "I went for two years before I transfered to Gordon! Ha! Take that, you ignorant fool!"

Well, friends, guess what? There are people in the world with even greater exposure to all things un-Gordon than you! Who have no clue what evangelical even means and who have never seen so many look alikes together in one place in their lives.

    And the same goes for homeboy who was so proud of his knowledge of street Spanish. Listing my 10 years of bilingual schooling, my experience providing interpretation services and my experience tutoring Spanish is probably irrelevant here. Never-mind the fact that Spanish is my first language and it's the only thing I've ever spoken with my mother. I would be just like him if I began to engage him in his world of laying claims to cultural capital. Because in the end, there is someone who speaks even better Spanish, who is more Dominican than the both of us combined; namely, people who live in DR. So our cultural battle here would be nothing more than trying to prove one of us is more clueless than the other. So that it doesn't have to do with culture at all, but with pride.