Why do we think that?

Why do we like some things and dislike others? Where does our taste in music, art, books, architecture, movies and just about everything come from? Why do some of us feel lost if we can’t see water from our front window while others long for the mountains? Do any of us prefer the landlocked flatlands? Oops, my mistake revealing my opinion. Opinions. Where do we get them?

“What’d’ya think?” I asked a bookseller friend about a novel I’d just read. “You think it’s any good?” The bookseller looked around the shop, waited for what seemed a long time, and answered, “I’m not so interested in having opinions anymore.”

How about politics? How do we become liberal or conservative? What opinions shaped the votes we cast in the general election? Are some of us born longing for change, excited about the possibility of the new, while others of us are born more cautious, concerned that in changing things we may make them worse?

I noticed that my daughter seemed to have a clear personality from the moment she was born. Did I? Or was my experience more important in shaping me? I’ve been powerfully influenced by my white working-class background. My father was a laborer who saw the union as the sole defender of the little guy against the bosses — the rich and powerful. I carry a bit of him inside me and share his views. But he was a harsh father, physically and verbally cruel. I would not be the father he was. Still, the man could really work. The factory or loading dock left behind, he spent hours tending his flower beds or building a cabinet. Unlike the jobs he hated, his personal work at home soothed him. Now I get up from my desk and find solace in the same work — the garden, the sauna I built during the COVID lockdown.

We often embrace what we’re taught growing up. But we resist what we’re taught, too. I have a friend who was raised in a Seventh-day Adventist family that ate no meat and neither smoked cigarettes nor drank alcohol. My friend had a happy childhood in a loving family, but when he went away to college, the first thing he wanted was a double cheeseburger and a beer. He took up smoking unfiltered Camels. Later, he abandoned his rebellion and went back to the food and drink he’d grown up with at home and in the church.

Sometimes what adults teach children feels wrong to us from the get-go and our resistance permanently shapes us. In my Arizona high school of 2,400 students, about half were Anglo-American and half Mexican-American. To graduate from high school, we had to complete two years of a foreign language. We could choose from French, German, Latin, or Spanish, except that native Spanish speakers were not allowed to study Spanish. The teachers suggested that these students already knew Spanish and were simply being lazy. This ignored the fact that many came from homes with parents who could speak Spanish but could neither read nor write it. Spanish-speaking students weren’t allowed to use their first language on the school grounds where their entire education had been administered to them in English. If they were caught conversing in the forbidden tongue, they were sent to language detention — a room where one sat in silence for 30 to 60 minutes.

I was pretty blind to this, but the day I graduated, my eyes opened. I vowed that I would learn to speak, read and write Spanish. I traveled and worked in Mexico, Central America, Cuba, Argentina and Spain. I began to play the Tejano conjunto polkas and música norteña rancheras that I’d ignored as a teenager in favor of top-40 English-language rock and roll. I worked at the University of Iowa’s International Writing program as a translation assistant for poets from Colombia and Costa Rica. I taught literary translation at the Universidad de Chihuahua. My work, my musical and literary interests, my longing for travel, my politics, my sense of self and community — all have been shaped by bilingual and bicultural experiences that were denied to me while growing up in a bilingual and bicultural community. Even if I was slow in coming to see it, the difficulties many of my Mexican Spanish-speaking classmates’ families faced were a lot like those faced by my white English-speaking family.

In Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the character Atticus Finch counsels his young daughter, saying, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” I’ve tried to understand what it feels like to walk around inside someone else’s skin. Still, I wonder — how are we to sort out what we’re born with and what we make from the world we inhabit? How do we form the opinions to which we cling for dear life?

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