I piled my plate high with fancy toast, strawberries, and as many medialunas (the Argentine croissant) as possible while scanning the room for coffee and a group of people to sit with. I couldn’t wait to get to eating this breakfast. I nibbled on it while picking up more Argentine morning delicacies. I eventually found the coffee and sat with some friends. I paid no attention to the people outside of our group — typical 19-year-old. The volume grew louder as the rest of our group finally made it down to breakfast.
My abroad family and I (all 65 of us) were in the dining area of some random hotel in Northern Argentina for our semesterly Educational Field trip -- I am not really sure what the educational part of this trip was. It was the first morning in Salta. The group was a little tired. But our chatter was still enough to catch the attention of another patron. He spoke with our director, Rafa. Rafa called to the group. He said, "Everyone, look who I found."
Rafa had found a man and his family on vacation. But this was not just any family. The parents were Pepperdine grads (like our group would soon be) and the father had participated in the Buenos Aires International program through the university. The same program my group had started a month previous.
This man stood up and said hello to all of us. He was holding a medialuna.
Our group instantly felt a connection with this man. He knew us. We knew him. No one could explain the comfort that he brought the group.
I don't remember this man and his family's names or what they looked like, but I think about this moment a lot. This moment represents for me the first time I realized the power of the imagined community and a shared experience spanning 15 years.
An imagined community is a concept developed by Benedict Anderson in his book, Imagined Communities as a phrase to define nations. To him, a nation is a socially constructed political community which imagines itself as connected and a part of the group across and within geographical borders.
But imagined communities do not need to always be on the national scale and focused on politics. The base of an imagined community is a shared sense of connection. This connection can be something as large as your nationality or religion, but it also takes place within people who have the same favorite book or went to the same small Christian university.
This man called my attention to all the other Pepperdine Buenos Aires program participants from the past and those to come. I will never know all of them – only my year really. But I will always feel a sense of connection to them and the experience that shaped all our lives. We all are the BA program even though we have been taken out of BA and spread across the world.
The timing for meeting this man who had been in our seat 15 years before seemed random. But in hindsight it was a clear sign for all of us to appreciate the Pepperdine imagined community and more specifically the opportunity of our BA imagined community.
We all love medialunas.