“It is a triumph of cleverness to correct in oneself such national failings, or even to hide them: you get great credit for being unique among your fellows, and as it is less expected of you it is esteemed the more.”
That’s Baltasar Gracián, writing in 1647, in his Oráculo Manual. No country escapes some original defect, he says, and correcting it in yourself is a victorious skill. Not denying it or pretending it doesn’t exist. Actually correcting it.
“Chamuyero.” That’s one of the original defects we inherited as Argentines. It’s Rioplatense for smooth talker. A person who convinces you of something by exaggerating, making things up, or simply inventing it. It’s as much a part of the Argentine cliché as mate or football. And it’s exactly what I choose not to be.
I’m not ashamed of being Argentine. I’m proud of plenty of it: the warmth, the ingenuity, the hospitality with strangers. But “el chamuyo,” that habit of persuading through exaggeration or invention, that’s not something I want to practice or get good at. Not even a little. I can drop it entirely and still be fully Argentine.
Identity isn’t a package you accept or reject in its entirety.
The same thing happens with family. We all learned lessons from our upbringing. And it’s always a mixed bag. We have things we can be proud of and choose to mimic (we make them our own), and other things we don’t want to emulate and do the opposite of. Maybe it was ways of handling conflict, showing care and affection, dealing with money, or staying quiet when we felt like exploding in anger. No family escapes this. The question was never whether you inherited something good and something faulty (everyone does). It’s what you do with what you got.
Countries and entire cultures work the same way. And that’s where identity integration comes in. When you move to a new city and country, when you start living in another language, you get offered the same deal your home country offered you. The whole package arrives at once: the admirable and the regrettable. The temptation is to take all of it, because it feels like that’s the price of belonging. You absorb the new place’s faults the same way you absorbed your own. Unquestioned, just because the postal code changed.
Identity integration doesn’t work that way in either direction.
It’s not keeping the whole package from your country of origin because “that’s just how we are.”
It’s not swallowing the whole package from the new place because “that’s how it’s done here.”
It’s discernment, both ways: what you correct in what’s yours, what you decline to absorb from what’s new.
It’s what you actually claim from each side because you genuinely admire it.
Two questions for you:
- What’s one thing from your home country you don’t want to claim as part of your identity?
- What’s one thing from a country or culture you admire that you’d like to make your own?
Source: Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia), aphorism IX, translated by Joseph Jacobs (1892, public domain). Original: “No ai nación que se escape de algún original defecto… Vitoriosa destreza corregir, o por lo menos desmentir estos nacionales desdoros: consíguese el plausible crédito de único entre los suyos, que lo que menos se esperava se estimó más.” (1647).