Ethnic identity is the particular lineage of language, story, food, grief, and celebration that a people have accumulated over generations and that lives — sometimes consciously, sometimes not — in the bodies of their descendants. It is among the most intimate of inheritances, carried in the cadence of a grandmother's voice, in the taste of a dish that means home in a language you may no longer speak. To examine it is not to dissolve it but to understand what you are tending and why.
Juana