I grew up in middle-class northeast suburbia. At 25 I felt inspired to relocate to the northwest. From what I knew it seemed like a gloomy San Francisco with lots of counterculture, music, art, food, and managebly-sized communities. Had I an impressive resume in design or non-profit management, or a resignation to work for minimum wage in a funky retail establishment, or had I not burned out from restaurant work in college, I perhaps would have hob-nobbed with the hipsters who made it famous. Instead, I took work where it came my way, landing first in hospitality, earning $10 per hour, second in a trade shop earning slightly more, and third in construction administration, which I clung to when the economy crashed and unemployment skyrocketed.
Though I witnessed enough examples to confirm my expectations of my adopted home, the culture I spent my days within differed greatly from the cutting edge worldly city I saw described in the New York Times articles my family forwarded to me. My co-workers, all middle-age native Oregonians did not resemble the scarved, literary types donning thick-rimmed glasses smoking cigarettes outside Powells, nor did we have any wide-hipped liberal mothers with grey boy-haircuts that I always saw at the markets, nor the vegans who use, eat, bathe and clothe themselves in hemp or the REI-clad Subaru-driving outdoor sports fanatics with $10,000 on the roof rack and two dogs in the backseat. I saw these people, yes, but you can find stereotypes everywhere if you look.
Some of my co-workers drove pick-up trucks, some were religious and spoke openly about their faith in an evangelical way. More than a few started their families in their teens or early 20’s, and almost all spent their vacations camping somewhere in Oregon, though only some had RVs. Less than half had ventured out farther than their neighboring states, and only the executives and one or two others ate at the restaurants that held the national spotlight and even they found the unfamiliar ingredients unpalatable and complained about the prices.
When I first signed up for AAA, I discovered that I had joined the Oregon/Idaho chapter, which surprised me because I had always considered the two states so different. I came to learn that, outside of the metro areas of Seattle and Portland, and even inside it, many people of Oregon and Washington embodied what many outsiders considered more Idaho and Montana traits.
This unsettled me initially because I found myself regarded as a prissy snob, (me, the quirky nerd with wacky ideas and a mish-mash fashion sense,) and worse I discovered they were right.
When we think of New York we think of Sex in the City and Donald Trump (and Seinfeld and Woody Allen) but we don’t think of the many denizens of the outer boroughs, the bridge and tunnel workers who drive the cabs, clean the windows and man the hot dog carts. When we think of LA we think of blonde bombshells, movie stars and other sparkly things, not the Jimenez family of Echo Park or Pham Nguyen, the dental hygienist. Likewise, Portland conjures visions of hipsters, hippies, and eco-people, not my co-workers who changed their own oil and shot their own dinner.
I have always found myself seeking comfort in the subculture. I have always swam against the mainstream. Yet when the mainstream embraces the subculture a shift takes place, yes, and you find yourself making out in a pickup truck in the middle of the woods with a gun under the seat…but initially something about this element in Portland disconcerted me. I recalled a couple of Hispanic friends I had back east, one of Puerto Rican heritage, and the other a Colombian, both of whom harbored deep prejudices against Mexicans. The Colombian came from a neighborhood in Queens where she never needed to speak English except in school, yet she lashed out at the clumsiness of the ‘stupid Mexicans’ whenever given a shadow of an example. I always found that strange, that people in the branches of the same culture could despise each other, until I moved to Portland.
Those with liberal sentiments find it easy to forgive those of other ethnicities. We chalk up all differences to ‘culture’ which wears a halo of respect, boomeranging guilt of our own ignorance back at ourselves. We find it significantly more difficult to forgive our own race’s subcultures. We don’t see it as ‘culture’ now, but instead pick through the differences holding those we can’t understand with up to the light.