culture

If you grew up like me, you remember being pushed to give an abrazo to relatives you didn’t remember or who just plain gave you the heeby jeebies. I survived all those awkward moments, but I’m not planning to put my children through them. When Ana recently posted about piercing her daughter’s ears, it was the occasion for our first disagreement (friendly, of course). In explaining my reasons for not piercing my girls’ ears, I referred to my belief in bodily autonomy.Read More ...

There are rites of passage in many cultures that are sure to raise eyebrows, and even judgmental comments, from others. Many are justified for being inhumane and even torturous, but I refuse to believe that piercing my daughter’s ears when she was an infant falls within that spectrum. If I sound defensive right off the bat, I might be just a tiny bit. This week I wrote an article over at my Babble Voices blog – Besos – titled “HowRead More ...

As many of you know, cooking is not my forte. I know how to make a few dishes and between those and the ones my husband makes, we manage to feed our family of four. Unlike most Latina women I know, I didn’t grow up in a household where women cooked and passed on their skills to the next generation. I grew up in an atypical Latina house where my father cooked because my mother (and her mother) where neverRead More ...

What is culture? Marisol asked me that last week as we drove to preschool for the Cinco de Mayo celebration. It’s a simple question with a complicated answer. I found myself saying something like, “Culture is something a group of people share, usually from the same place, like a country, like food and music and, well, you know, like we speak Spanish.” I know — explanation fail. I’m still not sure how to answer her question. We share a culture, stemmingRead More ...

Is it just me or does it seem that there are more baby showers in the spring than in the other seasons of the year? Recently, some friends and I hosted a baby shower for another amiga.  When I commented to my mother-in-law that I would need her help taking care of Sofía for the day because the shower would be at my casa, her eyes lit up! And then the stories started pouring out about how much she and herRead More ...