A Mexican American Cultural Experience: Traditions and Identity

My grandmother always said that making tamales alone meant you were angry at your family. I never understood what she meant until the December morning I stood in her kitchen watching aunts, cousins, and neighbors arrive with bowls and aprons, filling the small space with Spanish chatter and the smell of masa. Everyone had a job: spreading corn dough, spooning meat, folding husks, stacking the finished bundles into the enormous pot that lived under the sink all year just for this. I was sixteen and tried to work quietly in the corner, but my aunt kept pulling me back to the table, fixing my folds, laughing when the filling squirted out.

That morning taught me something I had only felt in pieces before. Being Mexican American is not about choosing one culture over another or balancing two separate lives. It is about the traditions that hold people together, the language that shifts mid-sentence, and the knowledge that some things only make sense when they are shared.

I grew up in a suburb outside Phoenix where my family was one of the few Mexican households on our street. My parents spoke Spanish at home and English everywhere else, switching so automatically I barely noticed until middle school, when I realized my friends had no idea what my mom was saying when she picked me up. At school, teachers mispronounced my last name, and the cafeteria served hard-shell tacos on Tuesdays that looked nothing like the food we ate. I felt split, as if I had to be one version of myself with my white friends and another at family gatherings. That changed during high school when I joined a Chicano student group and met other kids who understood what it meant to translate for your parents at the doctor's office or to feel embarrassed by the very things that made you proud.

The tamalada was the tradition that made me stop seeing my culture as something to explain and start seeing it as something to protect. In my grandmother's kitchen, I learned that the event was never really about the food. It was about my tía telling the same joke every year while she seasoned the pork, and my cousin teaching his white girlfriend how to spread masa without tearing the husk, and my grandmother switching between English and Spanish depending on who she was scolding. The work went faster with more hands, but the point was being there. When I got to college and tried to make tamales in my dorm kitchen with a roommate, the recipe turned out fine, but something was missing. I realized that the tradition required voices, arguments over the correct amount of chili, and the chaos of too many people in one space. My culture was not something I could practice alone or preserve in a recipe box.

Language was another part of my identity that I had to learn twice. I spoke Spanish fluently as a child, but by high school I had lost some of it, stumbling over verb tenses and reaching for English words when I could not remember the Spanish ones. My grandmother noticed and started correcting me, gently at first, then with more insistence. She told me that losing the language meant losing the stories, the jokes that only worked in Spanish, the prayers she taught me. I took a Spanish literature class my freshman year of college, thinking it would be easy, and felt ridiculous sitting among students who learned the language in high school while I, who spoke it at home, struggled with written grammar. But reading Garcia Marquez and Sandra Cisneros in their original language reconnected me to something I had let slip. I started calling my grandmother every Sunday, and we spoke only in Spanish. My sentences were clumsy, but she was patient, and slowly I found my way back.

Some people argue that holding on to cultural traditions keeps immigrant families from fully joining American society, that language and customs create divisions instead of unity. I understand that concern because I have felt pressure to prove I am American enough, to show that my family belongs here. But that argument assumes culture is something you either keep or lose, as if being Mexican and being American cannot coexist. My experience has shown me the opposite. Speaking Spanish has not kept me from succeeding in English classes, and making tamales has not stopped me from eating pizza. The idea that tradition holds people back ignores the strength it provides, the sense of identity that helps people navigate a country that often treats them as outsiders. My culture is not a barrier to being American. It is the reason I understand what it means to belong to more than one place.

I do not make tamales every December now that I live four states away from my grandmother, but I video call into the kitchen while everyone works, and my aunt saves me a dozen in the freezer for when I visit. I have learned that being Mexican American means carrying two histories, switching languages without thinking, and finding home in rooms that smell like cumin and cilantro. It means understanding that some questions do not have simple answers, like whether I feel more Mexican or more American, because the truth is I am both and neither, shaped by two cultures that do not cancel each other out but make me whole. I still think about what my grandmother said that December morning, and I finally understand. You do not make tamales alone because the tradition is not about the food. It is about the people who show up, the hands that work together, and the knowledge that some things are only worth doing when they are shared.

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