Disparate Cultural Constructs Posted on June 22, 2008 Luis H. Zayas (bio) talks about how the idea for the DILCYF Conference began.

The R13, this conference grant, came about as a result of the kind of disparate sort of definitions of culture, of cultural constructs. It came about as a result of questioning what aspects of the Latino cultures are important to integrate into interventions as we adapt them. Ultimately we were also thinking, is it the intervention we're adapting or is it changing the behavior of the interventionist? Which is probably more that, that we're trying to help interventionists do the intervention differently with folks.

So this notion of culture, we're always reminded that it doesn't stay still. Just when you think you've defined it, it moves, and so we have to consider what we're talking about when we're talking about culture because there are, Latinos are heterogeneous. They're from all over the place. They share some commonalities, language being among them, and several cultural features, but then they become quite different. And so we can't say, "The Latino culture," but, "Latino cultures." And then as a clinician in a particular neighborhood or community, then there I would then adapt the intervention according to the group that I'm serving.

And so what we have to keep in mind is what are their commonalities, but what are the differences among them. And so when we talk about cultural competence, which is a term that I have not yet arrived at some comfort level with because we don't know what cultural competence is, but we do know about something about making things culturally congruent.

There's an idea that what we need is locally contextualized knowledge. That's one way of looking at culture is what knowledge do we have in a particular place at a particular time with that population? So if I'm a clinician doing work in East Harlem, or Spanish Harlem as it's known, when I was there as a young clinician, I knew most of my clients would be Puerto Rican and Dominican.

I come back 25 years later, and it's changed. So the practice that I had and the way I approached it culturally, really, is different now because now we've got Mexicans and many Central Americans there. And they're different from the Caribbean group, not vastly, but enough so that if you're doing clinical work, you've got to be careful about what you're doing. And so that's where this locally contextualized knowledge is so important.

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