One year ago, I went back to my native land, Puerto Rico, to spend Christmas with my grandparents and other relatives. I was saddened by the many things that had changed in the country in the ten years I had been absent. The economy in Puerto Rico is in a serious state of disrepair and the island's high unemployment rate and strategic geographic position made many inhabitants fall into the hell of drug dealing and abuse. As alarming as these developments are what was most upsetting about the island's condition was the fact that the native culture of the country slowly is disappearing.

What brought this home was a conversation with my cousin, who has lived there most of his life. We were talking about music, and I mentioned the name of Nano Cabrera, a legendary virtuoso on the native stringed instrument, the cuatro. When I started talking about him, my cousin looked at me with a highly puzzled expression on his face and asked me who Nano Cabrera was. This opened up the conversation into Puerto Rican culture, of which he was almost completely ignorant. By the end of the week, I found, unfortunately, he was not an exception. Most people of my generation living in Puerto Rico find the island's culture as unfamiliar as that of China.

Oddly enough, I found that all the people I talked to could have been my neighbors here in State College. Their awareness and enjoyment of American culture is as pronounced as that of the regular young person anywhere in this society. Since then, I have spoken with friends and acquaintances from Puerto Rico and other countries and they report basically the same findings. It seems that the American cultural industry of music, movies and television may succeed where arms would fail, that is, in "Californicating" the world.

I will admit that I enjoy American culture as much as the next person. Yet, something is frightening about a culture with extremely sophisticated methods of promotion and advertising and the capital and know-how to export itself to other lands.

The government and cultural organizations of Puerto Rico have put up a brave fight to keep the native culture alive, as can be attested by the efforts of people like folk singer Tony Croatto and scholar Dr. Ricardo Alegria. But what they can do with their limited capital and resources is sometimes not nearly enough against the onslaught of McDonald's and Columbia Pictures. As a result, some arts, crafts and practices have fallen by the wayside, or, only are remembered in books, because no one who still can do such things is alive.

This may seem, to the insensitive or uninformed, much ado about nothing, but picture the logical conclusion. The Hollywood Boulevard-Madison Avenue Juggernaut succeeds in homogenizing the world. Are you prepared for a world where it is impossible to escape Debbie Gibson, Morton Downey Jr. and Eddie Murphy? Can you picture the Big Mac as the local cuisine in Beijing? Or Guns'n'Roses as the new brand of flamenco? That's right, the mind boggles and the knees weaken. This uniform culture would remove some of life's greatest pleasures, the excitement of diversity and the shock of the new.

Besides this lies the danger of stagnation because of a lack of diversity. If the culture is homogeneous around the world, how will ideas and styles be challenged? Where will anything new come from? The history of culture basically has been the history of integration of foreign ideas with native invention. Both need one another in order for the culture to flourish.

I fear for the culture of my homeland, and I do my best to keep some of it alive in my heart. Yet there is reason for hope. I heard from my cousin this past Christmas. He had just bought Nano's latest album.