ABSTRACT
In the past few years, several events and situations have occurred that have destroyed my notion of who I am, what I believe about myself, and how others perceive me. In 2011, when I wrote a poem called “The coal miner’s daughter gets a PhD,” I firmly situated myself as an Appalachian woman, not to be confused with a “Southern woman” (Smith, 2016). In a later poem, “Reconciling two selves in one body,” I referenced my family’s childhood stories about my dad’s Cherokee grandfather. I referred to another Tilley family story that our ancestors were named “Tellez,” the last name of the Spanish sailor who shipwrecked with the Spanish Armada on the coast of Ireland in the 1500s, never to return to Spain. In that same poem, I talked about being bilingual, deconstructing a friend/colleague’s comment that I was a different person depending on whether I spoke English, which is my mother tongue, or Spanish, my acquired language. This is a perception that I question now. I thought I had figured out my cultural identity. In my graduate course on diversity, for years I have used myself as an example of someone who to all appearances is white, middle class, and so on, but who has indigenous and Spanish heritage. But I am someone whose cultural memberships are within the categories normed as having power and privilege. The conundrum I will explore in this chapter is: how do I reconcile my perception of who I am and what I believe about myself with new information I recently discovered about my family and my way of navigating the world?
