Hello and welcome back.
If you’re new here, my name is Raquel. I’m a small batch cacao blend maker, a professional career-hopper (or career portfolio-builder, depending on the day), and a lifelong learner — someone who pivots, adapts, strategizes, and teaches others how to do the same. This series lives at the intersection of all of that. It’s about the maker: me. It’s about the plant: cacao. It’s about the questions, the critiques, the cultural curiosities, and the everyday practices of infusing plant medicine and mindfulness into your life — not just mentally and emotionally, but physically, spiritually, and even financially.
This episode, we’re going somewhere I’ve been wanting to go for a while. We’re going deep into culture — what it actually means, where the word comes from, how it has been used and misused and weaponized and reclaimed. And then, inevitably, we’re going somewhere personal: my own culture, my own mosaic, and what it means to be first-generation born in the United States with a whole lot of layered, tangled, beautiful, complicated inheritance.
I’ll warn you upfront: I am not a linguist, not a biologist, not an anthropologist, not an agricultural expert. What I am is someone who researches, reflects, and speaks from lived experience. So take this as that. This is not a lecture. It’s a conversation, and I hope you feel like you’re walking through it with me.
Start at the Root: What Does “Culture” Actually Mean?
I like to begin with etymology — the root of a word — because I think the root tells you something essential. Something that all the layers of history, power, and usage can’t fully cover over.
The word culture, in English, comes from the Latin colere — C-O-L-E-R-E — which means to tend to, to cultivate, and ultimately to care for the Earth. The original use of this word was purely agricultural. Culture was what you did to soil. You tended it. You prepared it. You gave it conditions to grow.
And this lands differently for me now that I’m in the business of cacao — a plant that has its own extraordinary relationship to soil, to tending, to cultivation across almost 8,000 years of human history. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
What’s interesting is how far the word traveled from that original agricultural meaning. Interestingly, the same root also shows up in the word microbiome — and I don’t think that’s accidental. When nutritionists and health researchers talk about your gut microbiome, or your oral microbiome, they’re talking about tiny ecosystems inside your body that need to be tended. The good bacteria. The probiotics, prebiotics and fermented foods that feed those little cultures. If you’ve ever looked at the label on a bottle of apple cider vinegar and seen something about culture, that’s the same word at work. Culture is literally what you’re feeding when you tend to what lives inside you.
So even in this very practical, embodied sense — before we get to nations or languages or identity — culture is the act of tending. Of creating conditions for growth.
How a Grounded Word Got Lifted Off the Ground
Here’s where the story gets complicated.
Around the time of the Roman orators, Cicero took the word culture and used it metaphorically. He wrote cultura animi — the cultivation of the soul. Suddenly, the word wasn’t just about soil anymore. It was about the inner life. The development of the mind. The tending of what’s inside rather than what’s outside.
Still rooted in something real and true, I think. Tending your inner soil is genuinely meaningful work. But watch what happens next.
By the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, being cultured became a social class marker. It described a type of person — refined, educated, elevated above the common. The word had traveled from the literal ground to the inner life, to a hierarchy. Now culture wasn’t just what you tended, it was a way of saying who was worth tending to — and who wasn’t.
And this, for me, is where it becomes important to hold the whole timeline at once. Because the 17th and 18th centuries are also the centuries of the slave trade. Of colonialism. Of European empires expanding across lands they did not belong to, claiming resources, people, and knowledge that were not theirs. The people who did this — the people who extracted and exploited and displaced — they were the ones called cultured. They were above it. Refined. Elevated.
Which meant that if you were indigenous, Black, Brown, outside the European Christian ideal — in dress, in language, in mannerism, in belief — you were considered without culture. Uncivilized. Primitive.
Particularly their culture. Not culture as a whole. Their culture, specifically.
Colony: The Word That Grew From the Same Root
Here’s a thing that stopped me in my research, and I haven’t been able to shake it since.
The word colony — as in colonization, as in the colonial project — comes from the same Latin root. Colonia: a settled land. The Romans used it.
And then centuries later, the European empires picked it back up and used it to mean to cultivate you, to tend to indigenous and Black and Brown peoples in a way that continued and sustained high culture, high society, high class for them.
Culture and colony. Same tree, same root. One word used to describe what you tend with care. The other is used to describe what you extract by force.
I sit with that a lot.
What Does Culture Actually Mean — Now, In 2026?
We are recording this in 2026. And the question of culture — what it is, who gets to define it, what we owe it and what it owes us — feels more alive and more contested than ever.
I think the word, at its most honest, is a living thing.
You can’t pin it down in one definition. It can’t be reduced to two polarities, or a single echo chamber, or a checklist of traditions and foods and holidays. It has always been layered. It has always been in motion. It has always been tended — and the people doing the tending have not always had good intentions.
Culture is food. It’s language. It’s music and stories and ceremonies. It’s things you can touch and taste and feel with your five senses. And it’s also something you can’t easily define — something you recognize more in the feeling of it than in any description of it.
I believe culture is tribal, in the deepest sense. And I don’t mean that pejoratively. I think humans have always formed groups and always will — we need each other, we need belonging, we need something shared. But I also think we’re being asked, right now, to see farther than tribe. To see that as interconnected as we are — globally, technologically, ecologically — we are, in some real sense, one tribe. And we don’t tend to that. We don’t culture that. We don’t build conditions for that kind of growth.
I don’t have the full answer to how we do. But I think asking the question honestly is the first step.
My Own Mosaic: First-Generation, Layered, and Learning
Now the personal part. And I need to say: this part is messy. I am intentionally practicing being okay with messiness, especially in conversations about culture. So here goes.
I was born in Virginia and grew up in Southern Florida. My entire family — my whole ancestry, as far back as I know — is from El Salvador. Central America. I am the first in my family to be born in the United States.
That singular fact — first generation — has carried more weight than I realized for a long time. It meant I had access to things my ancestors never had. It also meant I was in between. Not fully immersed in Salvadoran culture. Not fully American in the way the dominant culture defines that. Growing up in South Florida, I was surrounded by a Caribbean and Hispanic-Latino world, but most of the people around me were Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Colombian — also often first-generation or second-generation, also navigating their own version of this in-between.
So my sense of Salvadoran culture specifically — what it sounded like, tasted like, felt like — was distant. Arm’s length. I loved my family. I had the food, I had the stories, and I had some of the traditions. But I didn’t grow up in it the way someone who never left would have. And I didn’t grow up fully inside American culture either — not in a way that felt like home.
I have not felt 100% one culture. Ever. And I spent a long time thinking that there was something wrong with me.
The Shame Around Spanish
One place this showed up most painfully: language.
I speak Spanish. I grew up speaking Spanish at home and English everywhere else. But for a long time, I felt tremendous shame about how I spoke Spanish. I wasn’t fluent enough. I didn’t know all the idioms. I couldn’t catch every nuance of the slang that people who grew up in Latin America carry in their bodies. I couldn’t get the idiosyncrasies — the particular way Spanish sounds when it’s been lived in, when it’s in you from birth in a specific geography, in Central America, the Caribbean, South America.
I used to really question this part of my culture. Am I really Latina if I can’t speak it that way? Does this make me less than?
And then I did my 23andMe. And the results came back: approximately 40% Indigenous American, 10% West African, 47% Spanish Iberian, and a small percentage that traces through Egypt and the Middle East (the Spanish carried a lot with them, too, as it turns out). That’s the map of colonization written in my blood. Spanish mixed with indigenous. African roots were carried across the Atlantic by force. Indigenous American ancestry that goes back to the very land that cacao comes from.
And I thought: wait. The Spanish language itself — the language I feel shame about not speaking “correctly” — it wasn’t even the indigenous people’s language to begin with. The Spanish came and burned the records. Burned the books. Eliminated, as much as they could, the native languages and dialects of my people. And then they replaced them with their own.
So why am I shaming myself for not speaking a colonizer’s language fluently enough?
That question cracked something open for me. And I don’t say that to be anti-Spanish, or to erase what Spanish has become — because language transforms too, it gets tended by the people who use it, and Spanish across Latin America is now something that belongs to the people who speak it. But it released something to understand: the inadequacy I felt was not mine to carry. It was the residue of a much older violence.
My cousin, who grew up here in the United States, barely speaks Spanish but understands it. She can read it, follow a conversation, and write a little.
Does that make her less Latina? Does the language have to be spoken perfectly, in the accent and slang of a place you’ve never lived, for it to count?
I don’t think so. I don’t think culture is that rigid. I don’t think it can be, and stay alive.
Latino vs. Hispanic: The Words We Use for Ourselves
This led me down a rabbit hole I want to share because I think it matters.
The word Hispanic comes from Hispania — the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula, i.e., Spain. So Hispanic, technically, has to do with a connection to Spain and the Spanish language. It’s a linguistic and geographic marker rooted in colonization.
Latino is broader. It refers to people from Latin America, and not everyone who is Latino is Hispanic. Brazil is part of Latin America, and Brazilians speak Portuguese, not Spanish. Indigenous communities across the Americas have their own languages, their own cultures, none of which were Spanish to begin with.
Most people I know would say Latino before Hispanic, if pressed. And I think that shift matters — even if it’s subtle, it’s a choice about which root you’re honoring. Are you naming yourself by your connection to Spain, or by your connection to the land?
I’m still sitting with what I call myself, honestly. And I think that’s okay. The tending continues.
What Reclamation Actually Feels Like
I want to end here, because I think this is where the whole conversation lands.
Reclamation — the act of reclaiming something, remembering something, redefining something that was taken or distorted or made shameful — is not a clean or linear process.
It doesn’t happen in one revelation or one Google search or one 23andMe result. It’s ongoing. It’s practice. And it is, in my experience, a lot like walking on a beach in the dark.
The moon is out, but maybe not fully shining. There’s some light, but mostly you’re feeling your way. The sand shifts under your feet — some of it wet and smooth and easy to walk on, and some of it dry and deep, and your feet sink in, and it takes more effort. One foot is lighter, one foot is heavier, and you’re off balance, and you’re still walking. You feel the wind. You feel the cold. You might feel alone even if someone is walking beside you, because so much of this journey is internal — it is within you, not outside you.
And sometimes a tiny crab runs across your toes in the dark, and you startle.
That’s reclamation. That’s what it feels like for me. Constant sensing. What feels wet? What feels cold? What feels true? What feels clear? The what and the why, over and over, as conditions change.
I didn’t choose my lineage. I didn’t choose the blood that runs through my veins or the history that preceded me. But I can choose how much to explore it, how much to embrace it, how much to tend it. How much to understand, engage, and nourish it. How much to make peace with?
That’s the work. That’s what I’m in.
You Are Part of the Next Layer
Wherever you are with your own version of this — your own mosaic, your own in-between, your own inheritance that doesn’t fit neatly into one box — I want you to know: what you’re reaching for is real. What you’re searching, embracing, questioning, feeling, and doing in response to all of it — that is real. And it matters.
You are tending. You are culturing something inside yourself. You are caring for the inner soil even when it’s dark, and you can’t see where you’re going.
And unbeknownst to you, that tending — that cultivation — is making you part of the next layer. The next evolution. The next level of growth. For your own culture, in the most personal sense of that word. And for the larger culture that we are all, whether we acknowledge it or not, tending together.
Thank you for being here. For being you. I look forward to being in your ear next time.
Take care.
Raquel Sands is a small batch cacao blend maker, clarity and work strategist, and host of The Clarity Shift podcast. She writes and speaks at the intersection of plant medicine, ancestral wellness, culture, identity, and income sovereignty. Find her at farmer’s markets in Arlington, Virginia in 2026, or reach out via email or the comments below.
