Two Worlds

I think my own identity crisis led to my study of migration. Growing up like I did in a semi-Amish rural home, insulated from the rest of the world, I have never felt completely at home in dominant American culture. When I first moved from home, it was quite a culture shock. Fashion, lifestyle, shopping malls, entertainment; it was all very foreign. I was constantly embarrassed to find out how few cultural references I knew and I felt that everyone was speaking a different language. Being lost in a world where I didn't know the rules was a lonely experience. Even now, I still feel like a foreigner in many ways, trapped between two worlds.

The migrant experience is often described in similar ways. Having left a home culture, they enter a new one, but feel like they never fully belong to either. For me, this is my point of reference to try, as a white middle-class woman whose family has been in the U.S. for longer than corporate memory, to understand just a little of what leaving one's homeland is like and the crisis of identity that it engenders.