Is it possible to change your regional identity?
I have been wondering about this recently. Say that you were born and raised somewhere, but in young adulthood moved to a different part of the country and gradually assimilated into the culture there. For example, if you were raised in the Northeast or on the West Coast and moved to the South or Midwest, could you ever become a Southerner or a Midwesterner? Would people there ever consider you to share their regional identity?
As a personal example, my aunt is from Wisconsin and moved to North Carolina as a young adult. She fully adopted Southern culture along with my uncle (evangelical Christianity, ranching, gun-toting, etc) and even changed her accent. So I'd say it is possible, it just takes a long time of living in one place.
I came from the Midwest and I fit in fine on the East Coast. Although, I was never really much of a Midwesterner at heart. But I think it's absolutely possible, but it depends on how much you're delved into the culture from which you came from.
Of course it's possible. It just takes time and openness to the culture. However, moving from the Midwest to the East Coast isn't the greatest change in culture anyone has had to deal with. Imagine all the Asians who come to Western countries for the first time in adulthood; they become the Asian Dad and Tiger Moms we think are anomalies but are instead just far from what they assume is acceptable.
That said, think of it this way: if you move from Wisconsin to NC at 17 years old, you'll almost invariably have picked up a ton of NC culture by the time you're 25 or 30. We change a lot between the ages of 18-25. So I think it depends more on where a person is in life than whether they "can."
You become that with which you surround yourself. The longer you are in a place the more you will shift toward the norms of that society.
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