Heritage In Motion: Exploring Identity, Story, and Connection
Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals.
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: Heritage, Memory, and the Stories We Tell
This week’s focus: Cultural Literacy
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1200 words, an estimated 4-minute read.
Heritage In Motion
On February 8, 2026, Bad Bunny performed at the Super Bowl halftime show — a performance watched by an estimated 128 million viewers in the U.S. alone, with millions more worldwide.
More than a medley of music and tight choreography, it was a celebration of culture, language, and heritage — sparking a global conversation across social media with billions of impressions. Fans and commentators explored representation, identity, community, and what it means to claim eclectic, diasporic roots — especially on a massive stage.
Naming countries across the Americas, accompanied by dancers carrying flags of a multitude of nations, and holding a football that read “Together, we are America,” Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance was a reminder that heritage isn't static — it’s living, expressive, communal and deeply personal.
For some, heritage is something they’ve been taught to quiet or simplify. For others, it’s something to embrace, claim, and celebrate.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
This month, we’re exploring Heritage Months as doorways, not destinations; as lenses, not containers.
When viewed this way, Heritage Months invite us to remember, celebrate, and reflect — but also to grapple with complexity, nuance, and the many ways identity is experienced.
Last week, we honored the 100-year legacy of Heritage Months by exploring Dr. Woodson’s vision for Black history: the spark that opened doors to a century of overlooked stories.
This week, we’re examining what it means to honor heritage without turning it into a static, confined box — to recognize collective histories while leaving room for complexity, connection, and change.
We’ll begin by unpacking what heritage is — and what it is not.
Heritage Unpacked: Living, Layered, and Complex
Before we can honor heritage, we need to ask: what do we mean by “heritage”?
Often, heritage is treated as fixed or singular — something we “get” from family, geography, or ancestry. Yet, heritage can be dynamic, evolving, and multifaceted.
For adoptees, multiracial individuals, those navigating multiple cultural contexts, or those who grew up in spaces where culture wasn’t explicitly named, heritage may be unearthed over time, chosen intentionally, rediscovered, or expressed in unconventional ways.
Viewed expansively, heritage can be collective memory, practice, tradition, and story — shaped by inclusion and exclusion, omission and remembrance, family narratives and education systems.
Heritage overlaps with, but isn’t identical to, related concepts:
Nationality: legal or civic connection to a nation or state
Race: a social classification shaped by history, power, phenotype, and perception
Culture: shared practices, language, and values
Ancestry: biological or genealogical lineages
Identity: the personal and social lens through which we experience ourselves and others
Heritage may draw from all of these — yet it can also live beyond them.
It’s transmitted through stories, rituals, music, food, silence, migration, memory.
It evolves across time and place — it can be inherited, interpreted, and reshaped.
Understating heritage this way gives us a foundation for approaching Heritage Months not as checklists, but as invitations — to explore, reflect, and connect.
Heritage as Celebratory Months
Heritage Months are more than dates on a calendar, founders, or firsts. They are windows into shared histories — and into how those histories intersect.
Consider what made Bad Bunny’s performance resonate so widely.
Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory whose residents are U.S. citizens, yet cannot vote in a presidential election.
Puerto Rican heritage reflects Indigenous Taíno roots, Spanish colonization, African diaspora history, imperialism, and Caribbean identity.
The performance was primarily in Spanish, with moments of English. The instruments, rhythms, and choreography reflected layered diasporic, multicultural influences.
It was not a single story. It was heritage operating across nationality, race, language, culture, migration, music, and memory — all at once.
When a video of Bad Bunny naming countries across the hemisphere went viral, it wasn’t only about representation. It was about recognition. About seeing one’s story reflected in a broader narrative. About expanding who is included when we say “America.”
That is the potential of Heritage Months at their best.
And people experience heritage differently:
Some feel immediate pride and recognition.
Some experience heritage across multiple, overlapping spaces.
Some are still carving a positive sense of identity — a growth opportunity that calls for care, patience, and intentionality.
The work, then, is to create many access points:
To expose ourselves to the lived experiences of others.
To give people space to tell their own stories.
To use language that feels affirming rather than imposed.
It’s unlikely that a single definition or approach will fit everyone — and that may be the point.
Heritage is not an fixed box.
It is a threshold.
A set of pathways.
A sliding glass door inviting us to step in, explore, and engage.
A Framework for Exploration: The Three Circles
One tool for reflection is a simplified tripartite lens — three concentric circles with the larger world serving as the outermost circle, inside of that is group identity or the stories of others, and at the center is self.
The Larger World: How heritage, history, and culture are recorded, represented, and taught.
Stories of Others: How communities and individuals share and experience their heritage.
The Self: How you interpret, practice, and define your own heritage.
For some, heritage feels strongest in one circle. For others, it spans two, or all three. This framework isn’t a formula. It’s a starting point. You might ask:
Where do I first encounter heritage — in institutions, in communities, or internally?
Where does my understanding feel most developed?
Where might it expand?
Reflection here has the potential to deepen empathy, cultural literacy, and self-awareness.
Why Complexity Matters
Exploring heritage with nuance is increasingly important in a world where identity isn’t always singular.
Across the globe, an increasing number of children are growing up as Third Culture Kids, navigating multiple cultural contexts.
In the United States, tens of millions now identify as Multiracial, reshaping how we understand race, visibility, and belonging.
Adoption, including transracial adoption, expands definitions of inheritance and highlights that heritage can be both relational and chosen.
Migration and global communication connect communities across borders in unprecedented ways.
Heritage Months provide structure for recognition and celebration. But to do this work well, we’ll want to leave room for multiplicity and nuance.
Approaching heritage expansively — through stories, music, literature, scholarship, community traditions — amplifies historically marginalized voices and enriches our shared human narrative.
And as a final recommendation for now, when leading conversations about heritage with others, we might begin with a quiet question: How do I understand my own?
Let’s Pause and Reflect
Where did you first learn about heritage — at home, at school, or elsewhere?
Do you see heritage as fixed or flexible? Collective or personal?
Which “circle” do you naturally connect with — the larger world, the stories of others, or your own lived experience?
How could you create space for others to explore and express their heritage authentically?
Heritage is not just something we inherit; it’s something we live, interpret, and share.
This week, with intention, let’s step through the doorways, look through the windows, and reflect on the mirrors that connect us to our histories, our communities, and ourselves.
Next week, we’ll unpack another story that defies fixed containers.
Theme: