Chapter 5: Voices of Preservice Teachers in the Borderlands: Exploring Cultural Identity Through Language

For most individuals, including these Latino/a preservice teachers, culture is a source of pride. Culture has been defined as “social[ly] shared cognitive codes and maps, norms of appropriate behavior, assumptions about values and world view, and lifestyle in general” (Delgado-Gaitan & Trueba, 1991, p. 17). All individuals are members of several different subcultures or microcultures that are interwoven and interrelated. Some of these micro-cultural groups form around race/ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic class, religion, geography, sexual orientation, exceptionality, language, and region/geography (Gollnick & Chinn, 2009). The interrelationship of membership in these various subcultures determines a person’s cultural identity. Reber (1995) defines identity as “a person’s essential, continuous self, the internal, subjective concept of oneself as an individual” (p. 355). Banks (2006) adapted Reber’s definition of identity to propose a definition of cultural identity as an “individual’s subjective conception of self in relationship to a cultural group” (p. 132).