By Diana Baron-Moore
A little more than a year ago I left my home town Albuquerque, New Mexico, to come to New York City for college. Now, as I’m returning for my second year of school here, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the process of acclimating to such a foreign place. Leaving home was probably the single most difficult thing I’ve ever done. For the first time in my life I was completely alone in a cultural landscape that I found bewildering, to say the least. On top of which, separation from the people I love and the places in which I feel comfortable, left me feeling as though I had lost a piece of my identity.
I have always been very proud of where I come from and been self aware in the act of defining myself as New Mexican. New York City is a place where my way of functioning was more than out of the ordinary, it was completely unknown. At my university, I found myself totally alienated, searching for any shred of cultural recognition. At one point, I even walked up to a total stranger with a zia tattoo to ask whether he was from New Mexico (he wasn’t).
It took me almost the entirety of my first year at college to find a sense of belonging. A year to develop a way to negotiate my values into coexisting with an ability to keep my head above water in this place so defined by the rat race where self preservation takes priority. I don’t regret leaving for a second because I know the struggle to define myself outside of my New Mexican community has been, and continues to be, the single most formative process of my life in terms of developing an awareness of who I would like to become and what I want for myself in the future.
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