What is culture? Culture unites us and culture divides us. It defines who we are and who we are not. And since each of us, with every purchase, meal, celebration, item of clothing, word and deed is actively shaping our own individual cultures, “there are as many cultures as there are human beings,” says Professor Emeritus and Redondo Beach Rotarian Alfredo Rolando Andrade. “It is how we learn. It is how we teach.”
Rolando includes the Directorship of Chicano Studies at Oklahoma University and an assistant professorship in Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio within his impressive tenure. For the better part of almost four decades, Rolando has researched the phenomena of culture.
Rolando, who immigrated from Mexico, shared many experiences of his own to explain culture.
“Short pants! When I first saw Bermuda shorts, I said I would never wear them,” Rolando explained. “And then the next week in Oklahoma is was 115ºF. That was when I bought my first pair of Bermuda shorts.”
“Pizza? What is pizza?” Rolando asked in 1963. “It was the worst thing I had ever eaten! It had these little fish on it. Anchovies! And then I soon learned that there were different kinds of pizza.”
More universally, however, Rolando told us to “Respect other cultures, because these other cultures have given us our culture. Our nation represents the world. And this is why I love Rotary: Rotary is about a universal culture, which serves the world.”