There are over 45 million “Colombians” living within the country’s borders and about 5 million abroad. I am said to fall under the latter category. However, of these 50+ million individuals, can we really sit down and agree on a set of characteristics in order to essentialize what it means to be a Colombian?
Though it seems easy enough for those who consider themselves Colombian, once challenged to unpack what it means most will recognize there are inherent limitations to this endeavor as there are any time one tries to essentialize anything. In the process of trying to construct an identity, one always leaves something out through any trial of trying to include something else.
Am I Colombian if I don’t eat bandeja paisa since I’m a vegetarian? Am I Colombian if I am an atheist and over 90% of Colombians believe in some kind of deity (mostly of the Roman Catholic variety)? Am I Colombian if I am against bull fighting because of its inherent cruelty of animals for the sake of human entertainment? What if I am for gay marriage, stem cell research, and abortion? Am I Colombian if I find aguardiente disgusting and I don’t drink coffee? What if I can’t dance cumbia? What if I am against both Uribe and the FARC?
Or do I just have to be born within the county’s borders regardless of my opinions on the issues delineated above? I was born in Medellin, Antioquia, but am I a Paisa? I have only lived in Colombia for about third of my entire life. I speak Spanish, but am not considered by home-grown “Colombians” as one of “them” because I have been away for too long and have gathered different experiences that “they” don’t share. Sometimes I am considered a gringo, but in the US sometimes I am regarded as a spic or alien. I’m a stranger in my home land, and everywhere else I have lived (USA, Canada, Chile, Japan) I am not identified as one of them either. In fact, racist comments aside, I am mostly regarded as “Colombian” abroad even though I now also have a US passport.
How about our blood? Is there really such a thing as being 100% Colombian? If anything, maybe the Amerindians of pre-Columbian Colombia may have been closer to this than us, but even they were descendants of indigenous peoples that migrated South from Central and North America and Asia. Where do we draw the line?
Post-colonialism, the genetic make-up of what it means to be a Colombian has also been mixed with European and West African blood and the genes from those who have immigrated to the territory. We also have to recognize much Spanish blood, for example, is not just European but also Middle Eastern and North African. All one has to do is study the great wars of the Iberian Peninsula, the region, and their migrants, of the past 2,000+ years, to trace the lineage of Colombia’s ancestors. This may explain why I’ve many times been mistaken for indigenous, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern. Understanding such genetic history it becomes difficult to suggest that there is such a thing as someone who is 100% Colombian. In the process of trying to construct this identity we are sure to leave someone out.
Leaving Medellin as a child during the violent years of Pablo Escobar’s total war against the government, I was transplanted to a new country without knowing the culture or language. My sister and I were two of fewer than a handful of students who spoke Spanish in our new school. Being thrown into this new world I, like many who may have shared the experience, searched for an identity. I adopted “Colombian.” Nevertheless, for the sake of staying under the radar, the name on my Colombian birth certificate became anglicized and shortened from 4 names to 2. “You’re no longer Julián Esteban Torres López, but [insert American English accent here] Julian Torres,” I remember my father telling me this when we left Colombia and tried to survive as “illegal aliens” for over a decade.
With Colombia’s tainted international reputation I was bombarded by the essentialization of “Colombians” from “non-Colombians.” Every chance I got I took the opportunity to challenge their stereotypes and prejudices: “No, my father is not a drug dealer...No, we actually do have paved roads...No, I don’t drink coffee...No, I’ve never killed anybody.” I became an ambassador for Colombia and “Colombians” as an adolescent. Hollywood and the news made it difficult to grow up without being negatively portrayed by those who had never met me or "my people." As an adult, I’ve come to realize that this unwanted ambassadorship led me to become a scholar in Colombian culture, politics, etc.
Speaking with other immigrants around the world, I became aware that we shared a similar experience. We tended to feel more “Colombian” than possibly those living back home. What exactly that meant, I don’t know. We, in a way, embraced other stereotypes of what a “Colombian” supposed to be. This may have been due to the fear of losing one’s language, traditions, and culture while abroad, which led us to cling on to that abstract and somewhat imaginary identity maybe stronger than non-immigrants. For a while in my 20s I even tried to name myself and claim myself – as Khalil Gibran once wrote – by readopting my Spanish name in pronunciation, spelling, and number of given names. This confused my friends, and though satisfied me for a while still left an emptiness inside because, as I’ve come to realize, I am more than just the X identity I was trying to be. Instead of trying to toe the line of some abstract notion, I was who I was: a hybrid.
It wasn’t until last year when I was asked by a friend the following questions that I began to really dissect my identity: “Are you proud to be a Colombian? Are you proud of Colombia?” I don’t recall my exact answer, but I’ve meditated quite heavily on this topic since. Though for years I was a self-titled ambassador for Colombia and Colombians, I quickly came to realize that I was not in standing to answer such questions. Could I really take praise or blame for what Colombians have done, good or bad?
Maybe we can’t sit down and come up with a list of characteristics that essentializes 50+ million people. Maybe it is more like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance: there is no one characteristic we all share, but if studied as a group we can come to the conclusion that we are most definitely related. Or, maybe it’s like what the U.S. Supreme Court says about pornography: though we can’t agree on one definition, we know it when we see it.
All I know is that in three decades of reflecting on my so-called identity, I’ve come to accept that answering the question guiding this column is both personal and communal in nature. There seems to be a need or want to define others and ourselves in order to more effectively realize the lives we wish to lead as individuals and as collectives. Further, the answers seem to suggest that it is not a black or white issue. There’s a continuum, a liminal space where all of us fall between the affirmative YES and the affirmative NO. It is in this liminal space where “boundaries dissolve a little and we stand there, on the threshold, getting ourselves ready to move across the limits of what we were into what we are to be.”
My identity is a hybrid cluster of my own experiences. Friedrich Nietzsche may have said it best when he wrote, in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None,” the following:
“I am a wanderer and mountain climber,
he said to his heart,
I do not love the plains,
and it seems I cannot sit still for long.
And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience –
it will be a wandering and a mountain climbing;
in the end one experiences only oneself.”
Julián Esteban Torres López has a BA in Philosophy, BA in Communication, and MA in Justice Studies from the University of New Hampshire. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia Okanagan concentrating on Political Science and Latin American Studies. A Medellín native, he is presently working as a sessional lecturer at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. You can follow him on Twitter.
