On Peter Roberts, Identity

     In this post I am going to talk about Peter Roberts paper "The Roots of Caribbean Identity: Language, Race and Ecology.""  In this short essay Roberts talks about the identity of human being, more specifically about its national identity as he says "...in the modern, political world human beings are automatically identified with a country, and national identity is generally established by place of birth or place of residence."  This topic will be addressed towards the national identity crisis being experience here im Puerto Rico. Roberts also talks about Language and about how language has both beneficial and detrimental aspects to it, as he says "Language therefore establishes bonds between all communities of human beings but at the same time set up barriers between communities".  Roberts talks also about sameness and how it allows people to associate with one another as he says  "...it is the senses of sight (color/race) and sound (language) that provided the initial and usually most deep-seated conclusions about sameness and difference in identity."  This concepts will be developed with the intention of deepening our concept of identity.

Barcodes define identity.

 Someone with national identity is someone with a sense of belonging to a nation, in most cases to the nation they were born in to. People from the United States are a perfect example of people with a clear national identity, they have such a strong national identity that they have spread their culture all over the world. Puertorricans national identity never had the chance to mature, it was becoming stronger and stronger before the US came and stunt our developing nations identity. Since then our national identity has been under constant bombardment from other nations cultures and it have felt the damage but somehow we have persisted, somehow our pillars have not fallen. But by no means it has stayed intact. We developed the ability to be flexible with our identity we let somethings go, we let somethings come in and absorb them into our national identity. But there is a filter that must be passed before becoming part of our identity and that is language. We have gives up countess cultural rituals and costumes but not our language.

Fingerprint defines our identity

     Language is the most important pillar in our national cultural identity with out our language we could have not been able to stayed alive as a nation until this day. Our language is rich and strong but flexible, it conserves its structure but allows minor changes and that make some considerable effects on it. Our languages gives us the ability to connect with ourselves and with other within our group but as all languages it can create some barriers, but this barriers as not as hard to overcome because Spanish ans especially our Spanish is so flexible that it allows for easier barriers to overcome.

      Our senses are wired up and meant to give information to our brain so that it can make decisions. Site is the most influential of our senses when it comes to discriminating. I say discriminate but I am not talking in a dis respective manner I mean it in differentiating type of way. We discriminate because that's what were are wired to do we naturally like things that are the same as us and dislike the ones that are different. In society for example there are clubs which is a group of people that share some common characteristics and they decide to from a group. This doesn't mean that this people are completely the same, of course the have differences but they decide to let them apart so that they come together to work for a bigger purpose. Becoming part of a group is a human need we need to know and feel that we belong some were. This is because we are social beings we need interactions we need to be with people. This sense of sameness with the group gives us a sense of security that is compare to no other.

     We can conclude that national identity is based upon language and that our senses are our first tools of discrimination's, that we must master.