Stakes [Pull Up / Put Down]: An Interview with Cristina Silingardi
Photo of Cristina Silingardi. Photo taken April 4, 2019, and provided by Cristina.
I conducted this interview as part of Stakes [Pull Up / Put Down]. For more information about the project, read the project overview. To read additional entries as they come available, subscribe to The Letter.
When I posted a note about the Stakes project on LinkedIn, I had a few contacts respond and tag people they felt might have interest in participating. One of these tags connected me to Cristina.
Cristina and I met via Skype one morning for her in Austin, Texas, in the United States, and one afternoon for me in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Brazil to Germany to the United States
Cristina first moved to Germany from her native Brazil for a one-year internship. While there, she met a man who she continued to date after her internship ended and she moved back to her home country.
Later, Cristina married him in Brazil, after which they decided to move back to his home country. Three years later, the company where Cristina worked in Germany decided to expand its operations. As part of the expansion, Cristina had the opportunity to further her career by moving to Austin, Texas. She took it.
Her husband joined her in Austin full-time eighteen months later. As of the time of this interview, they had lived in Austin for twenty years.
Cristina said the time she spent in Austin before her husband moved to the United States helped her reground herself as an independent person with personal hobbies separate from her husband’s interests.
“When I moved to Germany, I felt very much like I needed to assimilate,” she said. Moving to Austin on her own helped her realize that she didn’t have to force herself to be “100 percent different just because I was in a different place.”
Cristina said that moving away from her country of origin in general, from her time in Germany through her time in the United States, gave her a chance to “expand more who she is.”
“I got to appreciate so many more things,” Cristina said. “I appreciate people a lot more. I realized there are so many ways to expand who you are and your enjoyment of life. It brings choices.”
A Three-Country Family
Cristina and her husband had two children after he moved to the United States. As she didn’t want to take a step back in her career trajectory, her husband took the role of full-time parent for the children during the first two years of their lives.
The family speaks Portuguese and German together—though Cristina defined the home language as “German”—and the children and their parents speak English at school, with friends, and elsewhere in their U.S.-based lives.
Cristina said that having children highlighted new differences between herself and her husband. Cristina’s childhood and her husband’s childhood took place in different cultures; they brought their separate memories and assumptions to their own parenting and needed to talk through how to create a hybrid style that suited the two of them and their children specifically.
Further, she said, they had their children in a third culture—that of the United States—which has its own child-rearing practices. They needed to confront and adapt to their U.S. community’s expectations and predominant parenting styles as well.
Having children in a country not their own—whether Brazil or Germany—gave them a perspective on the United States even beyond child-rearing that Cristina said she didn’t think they would have had without children.
“You meet people because your kids get along, not because you would have met via common interests or in another way,” she said. “We met and spent time with people we might not have encountered otherwise.”
The Emotional and Historical Weight of Citizenship
Cristina and her husband now have U.S. citizenship. Cristina hasn’t applied for German citizenship.
The requirements have since changed, but during her residency years in Germany, when becoming a citizen felt more relevant, the laws stated that she would have to give up her Brazilian citizenship to become a German citizen, which she didn’t want to do. (As she still hasn’t done; Cristina holds dual U.S.-Brazil citizenship).
She said she surprised her family when she applied for U.S. citizenship. She believes they would have accepted her application for German citizenship more easily.
“There’s a bit of a bias against the U.S. in many south American countries,” she said. “The dictatorship in Brazil was supported by the U.S. Americans think of themselves as liberators, but that’s not how other countries see the U.S.”
Cristina added that some people in Brazil see Americans as materialistic and arrogant—she said she even teases one of her sons about fitting this “ugly American” mold. The stereotype hasn’t helped Brazilian acceptance of the United States and didn’t help Cristina explain to people in Brazil that becoming a U.S. citizen was a positive move at the time.
She said that she sees Americans more as confident than necessarily arrogant, based on her experience, and felt that some of the misunderstanding is “a matter of translation.”
Cristina’s family has had exposure to her life in the United States through visiting her and, she believes, they now are more open to the country and understand her decision to get U.S. citizenship.
Career Challenges in a Long-Distance, Cross-Cultural Move
Cristina began her professional career in Germany, which was a challenging experience.
Even with an extremely high language proficiency, the nuances of the German culture in a workplace setting didn’t immediately come clear to Cristina—and people in Germany didn’t recognize the differences, either. This meant no one, including Cristina, knew what gaps she needed to fill in her understanding of the professional environment.
“We were middle class, but we had a high education,” Cristina said of her Brazilian background. “We assumed we’d be in some leadership position. There’s a status related to that that you don't realize. I expected to have a home and a profession. I didn’t see any limits.”
She said that she suddenly did see limits when she tried to get her career started in Germany, however.
“When I got to Germany, especially when my German wasn’t quite as polished, I felt at a disadvantage,” she said. “I couldn’t put myself forward as well as my colleagues. It was really upsetting to feel undervalued because my communication skills weren’t as polished as my coworkers.”
Examples? Cristina mentioned not knowing the protocol for following up on phone calls and e-mail messages. What was an overly lengthy delay and what was too fast? Further, when it came to meetings, how long do you wait for people? And she said she made a faux pas at a breakfast, when she started eating at the wrong time and could tell that she had surprised her hosts.
“It took me several months to find a job,” she said. “I needed to find a boss who was very progressive. I was the only woman in the department in a role that was hard-won but of a type that I had thought before was almost a given for me and for my career.”
However, Cristina said that she had a lucky break due to one of her cultural misunderstandings—a break that advanced her career and opened the opportunity for her career-progressing move to Austin.
“Because I was seeking to understand so much more and didn't feel like I could make assumptions or take knowledge for granted, I made in-person visits to places where we had subsidiaries,” she said. “I didn't realize that I was the only one to do it. Turned out to be great for collaboration.”
Cristina’s relationships with people in the subsidiary locations opened the door to her company’s later offer to move her to Austin as part of the company’s expansion.
“They were surprised in Germany that I was interested in the opportunity,” she said. “They asked me why I wanted to start over with a new language and country. And I said that it didn’t seem that daunting to me, because I already had done it.”
Gaining Outside Perspective on Your Country of Origin
One of the biggest advantages to moving away from her home country, for Cristina, was the opportunity to see Brazil more clearly. “My values and understanding of my own country changed based on the experiences I had elsewhere,” she said.
Cristina said one of her initial a-ha moments on Brazil from an outside perspective came shortly after she moved to Germany for the first time, when she noticed so many people with disabilities. At first, she wondered why Germany had so many more people with disabilities than Brazil did.
Later, she said she realized that people with disabilities in Brazil at that time didn’t have accessible options that allowed them to participate in society at the same level they did in Germany. “There were more movements to be inclusive to people with physical and mental disabilities in Germany, “ she said.
In more recent years, in the United States, Cristina said that she encountered much more conversation about race and overall equality than she remembers hearing in Brazil. “These conversation’s haven’t progressed as much in Brazil,” she said. “They're in the beginning of those conversations.”
She said that she still loves Brazil, though, and sees it as her country. “It’s like how you love a person even when you can see their strengths and their flaws,” Cristina said. “That’s how I love Brazil.”
Cristina stays connected to Brazil through her family, through listening to Brazilian radio, and through teaching her sons how to cook Brazilian food. She said she misses the music and the friendships she had when she lived there.
When I asked her if she had tried to intentionally build new friendships with Brazilians in the Austin area, she said that the Brazilian groups she encountered or was introduced to were informal groups and that she didn't have much in common with the members other than a shared country of origin.
Defining “Home” When It No Longer Exists
Cristina defines Austin as “home,” though she added that “there is still the feeling that part of my home is missing and gone. That part is how I remember my home as it was, which is no longer exists in that way.”
When prompted for examples, she referred to shared moments, histories, and perspectives. “Expressions and references you understand because you have that shared experience,” Cristina said. “References to movies from childhood—like my kids have with other Americans. Little jokes that you make that someone else would understand if they’d grown up there with you, together.”
Cristina thinks it is “highly unlikely” that she will return to live in Brazil at some point in her future. For this reason, she defines her living status as “immigrant.”
How does this make her feel?
“It makes me a little said,” she said. “I’d love to raise my kids close to my sisters. The kids all get along. It would be great for them to be closer as family. It makes me sad that they don’t have that.”
Cristina said that she and her siblings joked together wistfully that they would buy a big plot of land in Brazil, put six houses on it, and all retire there.
“How unlikely that is, but how nice that sounds,” she said. She said she has a very different relationship with her siblings than she has even with close friends. “We can say so much even with just a look.”
Conversations that Could Continue
Cristina and I had a stimulating, wide-ranging conversation that touched on many valuable aspects of this project’s focus. I had a hard time winnowing the discussion to the few points included in this article. (Though I’ve noted many points for future, broader-scale analysis!)
As with other conversations I’ve had via the Stakes project, my conversation with Cristina spurred a lot of reflection for me, even weeks after we concluded our call. I can easily imagine that we might have a second talk to follow some of these threads further—and could even try to find a way to meet up in person whenever we’re geographically nearby each other.
Thank you again, Cristina!
For more information about Stakes [Pull Up / Put Down], the project that generated this interview, read the project statement. If you would like to participate as an interview subject or have a participant to recommend, please contact me. To get updates on the project, subscribe to The Letter.