Beyond the Holidays: Celebrating our Authentic Selves Amid Confronting Biases
As we approach the holiday season and I welcome my family into the US, I ponder about the meaning of various holidays that are not necessarily celebrated in our home and those that we celebrate. This is my family’s first Thanksgiving in the US, and it is unlikely that we will cook the traditional meal of said holiday. We will mark a year of gratitude for the joy of being together, but the spirit of what this holiday tends to be with family and friends gathered and many memories of past years and traditions shared will be different. For our Cuban families, Noche Buena (Christmas’s Eve) takes the place of Thanksgivings. Like thanksgiving, it is a time where we gather with friends and family to share a meal and being together anticipating Christmas day. It is a time to share stories, memories, singing, and sometimes dancing as we share a traditional Cuban meal. Honoring what is unique and sacred to us within systems or a society that upholds certain traditions versus others, I am sure it is something we can all relate to. It becomes an act of resistance and resilience, of going against what is established and choosing what is life-giving.
As I welcome my family into the US, I am getting to know this country all over again. In facilitating their entry into the US culture and helping them settle down with all that is new and foreign, I have come to revisit their immigrant realities through their eyes, their unique experiences, and sadly, the biases they are already facing. I find myself orienting them to this context as they navigate their new Latinx and Cuban identities while holding the pain of the discrimination they are already facing. Some of these biases are the ones that we are also addressing within the ACPE community.
In the couple of years that I have been part of the ACPE Anti-Bias Working Group, I have learned greatly about the ways in which biases show up in our lives, traditions, in the work we do as educators and within ourselves. It seems that the complexities of our stories and various identities as people in the various roles within our organization become alive when we do anti-bias work relationally. It takes another human being (s), peers, patients, families, core curriculum and organizational structures (designed by human beings), to bump against that which is different in us and from us and creates biases.
As I continue to navigate and ease my family’s entrance in this country through the eyes of the Latinx experience, I find myself naming and offering a framework for them to make sense of their new experiences and their complexities. The dance of claiming one’s voice, speaking the truth while affirming their identity and uniqueness seems a familiar place as the one that our organization has embarked on in the last few years.
As we revisit our different commissions, certification, and accreditation processes from an anti-bias lens we are faced with similar threads of this relational dance of leaning into what is ours to claim and keep while revisiting and reengaging with others in what we need to let go and dismantle. The various task forces groups within the ABWG: language/immigration, race and gender, ableism, SOGI, and spiritual values continue to do significant work in providing educational resources, reflections, and challenges to the work of the organization and its future.
As we embark on a new year of arduous work, may we welcome a dance that challenges each of us to get out of our comfort zones and too familiar rhythms into one of newness, awkwardness, and vulnerabilities. May our ACPE dance floor be big enough to hold our dance with each other, inviting us into places of self-discovery as we do this work together- challenging and cherishing each other in our shared humanity.
By Rev. Cristina Garcia-Alfonso, PhD