I read Ortiz and most of Millington but I just focus on Ortiz here because I have more coherent thoughts:

I did not know that Ortiz coined the term “transculturation”.  To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t totally sure what transculturation was explicitly supposed to mean until looking at this reading.  I thought that it was cool that we were looking at an examination of the word in the text in which it was first used by the person who created it since many words are assimilated into the English language over time and it can be difficult to identify their exact origins.  Ortiz defines transculturation as the process of transitioning from one culture to another that “necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture” (102).  I was intrigued by Ortiz’s analysis of the painful process of transculturation for Africans in Cuba.  While both black and native labourers were subjected to harsh treatment under the status of slaves and both experienced cultural oppression under the newly dominant Spanish culture, the “Indians suffered their fate in their native land, believing that when they died they passed over to the invisible regions of their own Cuban world” (102).  While being forced to adapt to a new culture would be difficult under any circumstance, for the Africans it would have been many times worse, having just been “torn from another continent” and facing the prospect of having to “recross it (the ocean) to be reunited with their lost ancestors” (102).

Ortiz also nuanced that “To a greater or lesser degree whites and Negros were in the same state of dissociation in Cuba” (102).  Regardless of status in the master-slave dynamic, the process of relocating and re-establishing one’s sense of identity in a new place can be a difficult and sometimes painful process.  Obviously, having had some form of conscious say in the decision to relocate would have made things easier for the Spaniard.  The fact that some brought their families with them also would have eased the transition.  But the bottom line is that uprooting and re-rooting in a new environment where one faces an intersection of culture(s) is hard.  To an extent, I feel like many university students face a similar challenge when first arriving at school, since for many people it represents their first time not living in their family home and many travel outside their province or country.  I live in the United States which is about as close of a country to Canada as you can get.  The independence and exposure I have gained within UBC’s diverse population has been one of my favorite parts of this year.  However, even coming from somewhere as close as America, I still occasionally felt a sense of cultural isolation in the first semester and resonated with what Ortiz described (thinking about it once over, I’m not totally sure if what I experienced was culturally related or just college angst??)