Teresa Acosta My Mother Pieced Quilts

“Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have cultures. It is the climate of their civilization ” - Walter Lippmann. Culture has immensely influenced people’s life and the way they view the world and others due to where, when, and how they’ve grown and the people and things they’ve been exposed to. It is expressed in our educational views, biases, physical materials, preconceptions, and more.
To start with, one way culture shapes one’s perception of the world is through their

biases. This is shown to a great extent in Frida Kahlo’s Self Portrait Along The Borderline Between Mexico and the United States. Kahlo’s portrait shows herself standing like a statue on a pedestal between what seems to be two completely different worlds: Mexico and America; herself, representing the borderline. After feeling homesick for Mexico due to living in America for nearly 3 years, her ambivalent feelings grew stronger. The Painting shows The American side as being dead and unauthentic; while The Mexican side is illustrated as being candid and natural. The American side is shown as being very industrialized, containing factories and machines, depicted in dull greys and blues, on this side, Frida holds a cigarette. On the contrary, the Mexican side has a variety of warm colors, fertility statues, stones and rubble, a Mexican pyramid, sun and moon, and tropical plants which produce energy for the electricity generator on the American soil furnishing the pedestal of which Frida is standing on. Most importantly Frida holds the Mexican flag in her right hand, divulging where her allegiance lies. This shows Frida had an internal cultural conflict due to being mentally torn between the United States and Mexico. She lived in Mexico her whole life and she loved it so Coming to America was a drastic change and was not as cultured as Mexico but industrialized, hence her bias towards her country.
Physical things that are elements of one’s culture can also mold how one views other people similar to the poem “My Mother Pieced Quilts” by Teresa Acosta.

In this poem Acosta describes how a quilt hand sewn by her mother represents her family's culture. In the first stanza Acosta describes the use of the quilt in a very straightforward way, mentioning it’s practical use during her childhood. “They were just meant as covers in winters as weapons against the pounding January winds” She metaphorically reports the quilt as “weapons” which protected her from the cold. Moreover, in stanza 3, she begins to relate the fabric to important family events. “These strips of gentle communication cotton and flannel nightgowns wedding organdies dime store velvets how you shaped patterns square and oblong and round” Each fabric is unique to its own source holding its own significance in Acosta’s life. In stanza 4, “Positioned balanced then cemented them with your thread a steel needle a thimble how the tread darted in and out galloping along the frayed edges , tucking them in as you did us at night”. In this stanza Acosta describes how her mother was the foundation of the family and kept the family close similarly to the stitching of each fabric. In lines 30-38, “me lounging on your arm and you staking out the plan: weather to mix a yellow with a blue and white and paint the Corpus Christi noon when my father held your hand, whether to shape a five point star from the somber black

silk you wore to grandmother’s funeral” Acosta recalls these memories with her family and how close they were to each other during each season of their life, good and bad, they still had each other. The lines 53- 57 states, “sewn hard and taut to withstand the thrashings of twenty-five years stretched out they lay armed /ready/shouting/celebrating knotted with love the quilts sing on” Here she imagines the quilt rejoicing all the good her family has experienced in spite of all the adversity they have faced because just like each individual fabric sewn to the quilt the family stuck together through it all outweighing the bad with the good. Egor, Material culture can definitely mold one’s views toward other individuals.
It is often supposed that culture has nothing to do with one’s life choices and their perspective on the world and others.

This can be misconstrued in the the Short story, “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker. The two main characters, Momma and Dee are very different mentally, physically, and culturally. Momma is portrayed as being very homely, big and manly. She doesn’t feel smart because she’s never gone to school. Dee, on the other hand is illustrated as being “educated” because she’s the only one in her family who’s gone off to college, very pretentious and she feels her mother and sister, Maggie are beneath her and is embarrassed of

them.
Later on in the story Dee returns home from college with her boyfriend. “Dee next. A dress down to the ground , in this hot weather. A dress so loud it hurts my eyes… it was her hair. It stands up straight up like the wool on a sheep. It is black as night and around the edges are two long pigtails that rope about like small lizards disappearing behind her ears. ‘Wa-su-zo-Tean-o!’” Dee gives her family an Islamic greeting and a exotic hairstyle, unusual to Momma. Dee then tells mamma she changed her name to Wangero Leewanika kemanjo, “I couldn’t bear it any longer being named after the people who oppressed me.” It is evident that Dee doesn’t appreciate her own culture so she adopted another one. Granted one’s family culture may not be the culture they grow to love. Most times the society they’re surrounded by those people shapes them into the people they are.
In conclusion, Culture heavily impacts people’s views of the world and others in multiple ways such as their cultural biases, cultural materials, and cultures they learn to adopt.