In Barbara Ehrenreich's essay called "Cultural Baggage," I believe that the reason she decided to write the essay was due to the idea of having a cultural background but not doing anything to represent or show what it used to be in the old tradition of cultural background. Also to show that by everyone with whom she grew up around and was raised by, just as the rest of us maybe, we are growing up being told to go out and experience the world, not many of us are reliving what are ancestors did, as stated in this text,

"...I was raised with none, We'd eaten ethnic foods in my childhood home, but these were all borrowed, like the pasties, or Cornish meat pies, my father had picked up from his fellow miners in Butte, Montana. If my mother had one rule, it was militant ecumenism in all manners of food and experience. "Try new things," she would say, meaning anything from sweetbreads to clams, with an emphasis on the 'new.'"

In those couple sentences you can find that Barbara, from an early age, was taught that anything new was virtually good and should be done, in the essay it doesn't seem like there was much emphasis on trying anything custom from her cultural background, instead it was insisted upon her to try things from other cultures and to virtually forget about her own. I believe that the purpose for her writing this essay had to with her children. Because she previously states in the essay that" All this excitement over ethnicity stemmed, I uneasily sensed, from a past in which their ancestors had been trampled upon by my ancestors, or at least by people who looked very much like them." This excerpt shows that she isn't uncomfortable with being proud of who she is in a sense culturally because she really doesn't have anything to be really proud about that her ancestors seemed to have accomplished. She also later on states about her ancestors still being virtually uncivilized while other cultures were settled down and living 'civilized' lives. She is happy or more relieved if anything that her children when they grew up, don't share views that are different from hers or her mothers, or grandparents. I believe that the audience that she is writing for may not be directly stated but I do believe that by what I get from reading the whole essay, that we; the ones reading the essay, are the intended audience. At first reading I thought that it may have been her children, but she had already received their opinions on culture and race as stated in the ending sentences. The audience may even be the people who are so hooked up on their own culture that they won't go out and try new things, and see the broader horizon than just what their used too. Lastly, I believe that her major claim or thesis is,

"The more tradition-minded, the newly enthusiastic celebrants or Purim and Kwanzaa and Solstice, may see little point to survival if the survivors carry no cultural freight -- religion, for example, or ethnic tradition. To which I would say that skepticism, curiosity and wide-eyed ecumenical tolerance are also worthy elements of the human tradition and are at least as old as such notions as "Serbian" or "Croatian," "Scottish" or "Jewish""

I believe this quote is the major claim or thesis because in that she states her opinion and that statement supports her motivation to write the essay in my eyes, because she believes that people are better off not being wrapped up in their own culture and should go out and try new things, to be a more rounded individual, While others would disagree her because people should be proud of their heritage and be active in their own culture and not others. In conclusion, I believe that Barbara Ehrenreich's essay, "Cultural Baggage" infers that culture isn't something that we have to lug around and be confined to, we can and should go out and experience new things and not allow who 'we are' to hold us back.