Artifacts of my Cultural Dysmorphia

My definition: The assumed identity people place on you based on your appearance doesn’t correlate to how you personally identify and perceive yourself

As someone with colored skin raised in a culture that I don’t fully identify with I ask myself “who am I?” a lot. Almost feeling like an imposter in both, as I have minimal connection to my hispanic culture and feel out of place in the one I was born into. This internal struggle has risen to the surface again as I dive deeper into what it means to be a mixed person in America. What identities can I claim? What assumptions do people have of me? Are questions that I’ve been internally battling with. Questions are the central point of this auto-ethnographic piece and I’ve aimed to analyze my personal cultural dysmorphia and how vulnerability can lead to collaborative thought.

Creating a project like this is for people that experience what I have; people that feel like they are also trapped in this liminal space and don’t know how to navigate it.

Opening the Conversation

The goal of this project is to start the conversation about how we look at our own identity. These artifacts are a collection of ways I’ve begun to appraoch my personal cultural dysmorphia. They where crafted through an inquiry process in hopes that they would allow others to understand the importance of vulnerability in order to begin collaboratively working to uncover what our identities mean in context of today. Each of our unique perspectives has so much to add to the conversation, so it’s important to begin sharing your lived experience. Please use and share these artifacts in any way you see fit.