A Little Demographic Shift

A Little Demographic Shift
(The rural zeitgeist)

I can't help but notice that our little town is now slowly being populated by youngsters with curious non-native-sounding surnames that are not of the usual sort. I mean, not the usual mix of Chinese (Chan, Tan, Te, Chua, Uy, Wee, etc.), Spanish (e.g., Del Prado), and American (say, Napier, Logan, etc.), which we residents are long used to.

For instance, there is a little boy surnamed Singh (Indian). One fair-skinned girl has Dumitru as surname -- I asked around whether she is half-Romanian as I suspected, and it turns out that she is. Another girl is named Botwinik.

My most recent god-daughter has a Singaporean father of Indian descent so she has an atypical name. It is so foreign-sounding that I can't even recall it.

My next-door neighbor's young lady is partly of Arab descent and has a fitting name for it: Ayesha.

Recent beauty pageants included girls posing a challenge to conventional beauty standards just because they have obvious Indian and black (African descent) features.

Add to this mix the significant number of residents with Arabic-Islamic-sounding names, and it's a pretty diverse and -- dare I say the word -- inclusive picture.

The influx of various ethnicities is surely a challenge to small-town norms and, er, rigid weltanschauung.

I am sure the local schoolteachers and the Local Civil Registry Office have a better view from their big-picture vantage point.

I haven't even dealt with the choice of first names, which in itself is a babel of influences -- certainly a break from the old order. It's no longer even mainly American, which is the case with my generation. There seems to be, finally, a great departure from, if not a conscious rejection of, white America as the idyll, the "race" of prestige, or apex culture to aspire for.

Obviously because of inter-marriage, the ease and affordability of travel, and the widespread OFW phenomenon, not to mention decades of expatriates producing half-breeds, my little hometown is no longer what it used to be where everybody knew everybody that you only had to ask somebody's surname to get to know who his or her parents were and what part of the town he or she lived. It is slowly becoming a little global village.

I'm pretty sure it is the same thing in your own little old locality?