My Story
From the moment of my birth I became a citizen of hegemony and a dweller of the fringe. I am what I call an in-betweener, someone whose identity remains mutable, hard to define, oscillating between social categories that are never fully embodied. Unfastened.
Born in Eugene, Oregon, to an American father and Peruvian mother, my early childhood memories are set in the densely wooded landscape of the Northwest. Eventually, my mother transplanted our lives to the concrete labyrinth of Lima, Peru. As a result, my life has transpired across two very different realities: an America obsessed with its position at the center of modern-day hegemony, always looking inward; and a Peru befuddled by the brutal collision of European and indigenous cultures that left its identity so disjointed that the country compulsively looks outward for cultural references, too afraid to acknowledge its social divides and ethnic tensions.
—Ursula Pfeiffer“In-betweeners are the embodied proof of the relative nature of the social labels with which we categorize and classify the world.”
Because I fully belong to neither, the issue of my identity has been a ceaseless negotiation with the expectations of others. Too Peruvian to be American and too American to be Peruvian. I am a “Latina” in a country where every drop of blood counts towards an individual’s identity; and, simultaneously, a “blanca”—Spanish for White—in a Latin America where lighter shades of skin are exalted as a welcomed distance from the region’s indigenous roots. Thus, to present myself as one or the other in the wrong setting is to prompt rebuttals or, at best, polite skepticism.
There is irony in finding oneself unable to claim one’s own identity. But, our identity hinges on the other’s perception of who we are. Instead of a holistic appreciation of each other, we dissect and assess fragments of ourselves against arbitrary ideals in body shape, functionality, and social performance. That is, our looks, abilities and behavior. In this process, we are made to be adequate and normal or inadequate and faulty even when the categories and the ideals we are set up against are cultural relatives dependent on time and place. Yet, instead of recognizing this relativity we perceive our social assessments as objective and absolute.
Here is where in-betweeners are problematic to societies that anchor social order in neat categorization of the individual. In-betweeners are the embodied proof of the relative nature of the social labels with which we categorize and classify the world. Unable to fit the mold, they are presented as outliers and outsiders. Consequently, we, in-betweeners, often find ourselves observers on the margins. Some become innovators. I became an explorer of the human experience and journalism seemed like a perfect fit. Beyond covering day-to-day events, journalism forced me across social boundaries I might have otherwise left uncrossed. It led me to experience the complex dynamics of information access, of which voices are allowed to be heard and which are ignored or silenced. Journalism exposed me to the impact of institutionalized disinformation and media control. And all along, I continued my own explorations into theory until eventually theory took over and what emerged is the theory of social resource allocation (Pfeiffer, 2021), the cornerstone for Unleashed.
If I am to have labels, let them be my own. I am the heiress of wonderful storytellers from different continents, and the descendant of a long line of resilient women who, unseen and invisible, forged themselves into the bridges that connect each generation. I am a multicultural theorist, woman, mother, life-partner, writer, award-winning journalist and multi-platform media executive whose thoughts are like shapeshifters, sometimes emerging in English and others in Spanish. I am also hopeful.
My hope is that awareness leads individuals to free themselves from the many perceptions we—as a society—build around race, gender, age, and the multitude of categories by which we are constantly categorized and assessed in appearance, functionality, and performativity. Free from ideals we are seldom positioned to achieve, a sense of validation emerges so that we are finally able to simply say, “I am.”
