Notes on Cultural Integration

The Catholic world has spent the entire last week celebrating Semana Santa, or Holy Week. As most Ecuadorians practice Catholicism, Easter pervades the culture not with painted eggs and sugar bunnies, but with symbolic soups and reenactments of the crucifixion of Christ.

Ever since I was young, my Mom led my siblings and I to midnight mass on Christmas Eve. For a family of Jews, this broadened our understanding of culture and diversity through direct experience. Early conditioning has taught me to embrace whatever culture I find around.

Completely embracing a Christian tradition would not produce ambivalent feelings normally, but it happens that Passover falls in the exact same time frame as the Semana Santa. My family in the Unites States is currently together in my home town eating matza and reading from the Haggadah. Although it is important to maintain my own cultural identity, the childhood-midnight-mass in me wants to experience local tradition in the Ecuadorian manner.

The attached picture shows my alacritous face as I stir Fanesca, a soup that contains 12 different vegetables, each representing one of Jesus´ disciples. Figleaf gourd, pumpkin, fava beans, choclo, abas, lentils, peas, corn, zuchinni, green beans, cabbage, and onions. The entire family spends the better part of a day preparing all the ingredients. The final product is hearty, creamy, and tasty. Luckily it does not carry any leavened bread.

All of today was devoted to baking bread, a food we all know represents the body of Jesus in Catholic tradition. Again, the entire family participated, and again I felt strange. Baking leavened bread of Jesus during Passover? We started a fire in our large adobe oven at 7 AM to begin baking around noon.

Instead of simply joining the festivities, I mentioned the idea of matza and my desire to bake it. I recounted the story of Passover with my best Spanish accent. Sure enough, I had enthusiastic participants. We used wheat flour grown and ground less than 100 meters away by those who bake with it. The picture below shows me taking matza (they call it ¨Pan de Jacobo sin levadura¨) out of the oven with bread going in. Tastes just like a cracker but could use more salt, according to my family.

Sometimes integration brings us to a crossroads. At what point do we relinquish our own culture to fit into another? Where can we find middle ground, a place for cultural intercambio to learn from each other? When do we finish blog posts with idle philosophical sentiment?