My identity as a Yanqui scholar of Spanish literature is inherent in everything I've ever done professionally. I am part of the generation who got hooked on Gabriel García Márquez and Pablo Neruda and Lorca in the late 1970s. The Study abroad experience marked me strongly. It never occurred to me to try to pretend to be something I'm not, a white middle-class heterosexual Bill-Evans-admiring second-generation college professor from a Mormon family.
Following a comment by Leslie on another post of this blog, identity does matter. Even specializing in something unconnected to one's identity involves that identity. My ex-spouse would get that a lot too: why is woman born in Japan and raised in San Diego a Hispanist? Well, why not? Why is it normal for me to be Hispanist and not her?
My understanding of Spanish culture will never be identical to that of Spaniard. Or course, that is also true of any Spaniard in relation to some other Spaniard who has a different experience of that culture.
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One of my friends from undergraduate days is a rather famous medievalist now, Mediterranean studies, French based. She's Japanese-American and if I remember right her father was even born in Japan, came here as a baby. She does not speak Japanese.
How she got into this: French, and next Spanish, were offered in HS. Had a desire to become very good at these and also to learn more languages. Therefore went into Comp Lit because it was the major that would allow you to get the best at the most languages (that was why I did it also). Went into medieval because it was what would allow you to look at more weirder languages, language origins. Considered trying to learn Japanese but decided it would be too much work to get good and already had all of this Mediterranean stuff going on.
It's basically the same reasons I did what I did, the key being wanting to get good at multiple languages. If we'd been somewhere where the available languages early on weren't Romance ones, or that hadn't been part of Spain originally, we'd have worked on a different set of languages, probably.
My dad wanted me to study classics in Cambridge or Oxford. I don't know where that fantasy came from, but it wasn't mine, though I did like classics moderately well. I just didn't want to spend my career teaching ablatives of means and datives of interest.
I keep thinking about the time a class of 30 made a bet on my identity. I had told them I was Anglo from California and knew Spanish as I did because of study and general experience. It turned out that they did not believe it except for one student who was ex military and had traveled and knew there were Anglos who could speak really good Spanish, and believed I could be one such, especially if I said it.
It turned out he had bet ONE SEMESTER'S TUITION!!! on being right about this. I have rarely seen a person so happy to have won a bet.
... and there have also been those students who believed I had the northern European origins I say I have, but believed I must have had immigrant parents who passed a generation or two in South America before coming here. This is more creative, and yet more informed. But still. The point, if you are a language professor, is to demonstrate that you do NOT have to have any particular origins to speak a language well. So why WOULD you fake origins. This is my question.
Here is a piece on the case, of some interest (not sure how much).
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/jessica-krug-rachel-dolezal-america-s-white-women-who-want-ncna1239418
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