I didn’t grow up in a particularly diverse town. The majority of people were not only German Catholics, they were German Catholics who mostly came from the same rough area of Germany when they immigrated. It was a region so German that Christmas church services even featured German Christmas carols.
It was homogenous in other ways as well. All the music was country, because it was just out of range of any radio stations that played something else – a friends’ mom pointed out the exact intersection “where music died.” Everyone mostly watched the same pair of television stations, because it was rural and the television options were limited.
The result of someone like me growing up in an area like this is that it served to foster my contrarian streak. While some people embrace having a consistent culture all their lives – my grandmother once said she was even happy the two towns we lived between were a specific distance apart, because it reminded her of home – I found it irritating. As a result, I found myself rejecting everything about it. I didn’t want to be German or Catholic, I didn’t listen to the same music as the people who surrounded me, I didn’t watch the same movies. I reached out at any opportunity to do something that was different from the people who surrounded me, I wanted something else.
This makes me wonder if things would have been different if I grew up somewhere a bit more diverse, and also why I’m so pleased to see more new Canadians here. Immigration from the Philippines, India and Jamaica, for example, have resulted in new cultural events and a more diverse community here.
I think that having a bunch of different cultures interacting would make me less likely to reject everything about my own heritage. When you attend an event like the upcoming Festival of Cultures, you see the great things about everyone, new Canadians or old, but you also begin to think that maybe your own heritage isn’t so bad. When everyone who surrounds you does the same thing, it doesn’t feel unique, and I started to resent it, but when you see so many people doing different things, it starts to feel like your own culture must contain something special, too.
The lesson of getting exposed to many different cultures is that there is value in all of them, everyone has something unique they do and something worth sharing with the world at large. If that’s the case for everyone else, maybe that’s the case for my own heritage as well. I think that if my own home town was a bit more diverse, I might have appreciated my own background a bit more too. Because after all, everyone else has something special that only they do, and everyone includes me as well.
