Latino new yorkers and the crash of flight 587: Effects of trauma on the bicultural self

Abstract

An Argentinean therapist working in a clinic in the United States meets with a new client from the Dominican Republic. Sharing Spanish as their native language, the therapist is confident that he will understand this woman. In reviewing her family history he asks about the gender of her two children. She replies that one child is el ni?o, male, and the other la hembra. The therapist becomes deeply disturbed because la hembra describes a female animal, and he presumes this reflects the client's pejorative, self-hating view of females. Only later does he learn from a Dominican colleague that, in the Dominican Republic, la hembra is a commonly used expression for girls and women which has no negative connotations. This vignette is an example of the "myth of sameness," the assumption that one person understands another because of ways in which they are the same (Young, 2004). It is a myth because these shared characteristics may or may not create shared understanding. Indeed, the assumption of understanding when in fact it does not exist creates misunderstanding. The myth of sameness is a fantasy, unexamined and unexpressed until it comes to light as a result of the confusion and misunderstanding it creates. For the Argentinean therapist, this occurred in the peaceful, everyday setting of his clinic. For mental health workers in the disaster situation, the myth of sameness can greatly complicate an experience which is already overwhelming, traumatizing, and extraordinary. In this chapter, we will tell the tragic story of American Airlines flight 587, which crashed after take-off in New York on its way to the Dominican Republic. This was a disaster in which mental health workers and the victims they cared for shared some cultural characteristics, but, importantly, not others. We will examine ways in which the myth of sameness affects the establishment of empathy in the disaster situation, but also how it bears on the experience of the self. Since many of the workers and victims involved were Hispanic, or Latino, the flight 587 disaster provides an opportunity to explore what might be called the cultural self. The cultural self represents that complicated aspect of identity comprised of our experience of ourselves in relation to our race, ethnicity, culturedriven effects on perspective and behavior, and our sense of our relation to other cultures. Language is a basic constituent of the cultural self. In a paper on the psychiatric evaluation of the Hispanic patient, Marcos notes that "bilingual patients often report the experience of a language-specific sense of self; that is, they feel and perceive themselves as two different persons according to the language that they speak" (Marcos, 1980). For the bilingual person, this "language-specific sense of self" will manifest itself in ways that will be characteristic of both a particular culture and a particular, bilingual individual. Bicultural people will experience traumatizing disaster situations through their particular bicultural lens, and this will affect their response and behavior. Their cultural selves will affect their relationship to the group and its role in disaster response. The trauma membrane (Lindy, 1993) is constructed by the survivor community at these times to protect itself in relation to an outside world which has shown itself to be dangerous. The trauma membrane determines who is allowed in and who is kept out, and is an important variable for helping professionals in their efforts to be effective with these groups. The bicultural self will also determine the nature of the trauma membrane with certain communities, and how it operates. Let us see how the myth of sameness, bicultural self, and trauma membrane interacted and influenced the experiences of the people of flight 587 as they coped with this disaster. © 2007 Springer Science + Business Media, LLC. All rights reserved.