When you’re a first-gen Latino/a/x, your background can give you some unique challenges that your family and your “mainstream” relationships simply will not understand – but it also gives you unique strengths as well.
Strengths like being what my friend Maria calls being a “Cultural Sherpa.”
Which means you have the ability to interpret what’s going on in one culture to someone that belongs to another culture.
This type of interpreting takes years to perfect and many hours of “on-the-job training.” Most of us are experts at this before we are 10. 😉
How does this translate as an adult?
- You can read people and assess situations very well starting with that death look my mother gave me when I went for the second piece of flan!
- You are able to stay open to new ideas because you have a natural openness for different points of views.
- You can often jump into situations and act as a mediator because you just plain old know what’s going on – we’ve all had that crazy cousin that needed to be included in everything so we had to figure out how to make it work!
If you’re curious just how deep this goes, watch my first TEDx talk here. What’s something that was hard about your childhood that you’ve now turned into a strength?
