Customary Folklore: Rituals, Rights of Passage

Language – English

Country of origin – America

Informant Data:

Jose Sotelo is a 28 year old male who was born in Mexico City, Mexico and was raised in Riverside County, California. He joined the military at the age of 19. He joined the US Navy and deployed twice once in 2008/09 and once in 2010/11.

Contextual Data:

The social context for this item was when Jose initially met his co workers with his new military branch. This was an initiation into his squad in order to earn their trust.

Culturally, this item stems from a lot of military alpha male traditions where you have to prove you are physically strong enough to be a sailor. In this case they would not accept him as a sailor until he could prove that he could drink.

Item:

Warrior Night

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript of Associated File:

“It was one of those ones where I ended meeting a lot of my coworkers and their thing was you weren’t a real sailor until you were actually able to hold down your liquor so I remember that we were out in the field doing some training and it came time to pack up and we had was known as warriors night where we had to just get it together and drink and stuff like that. By the end of it we ended up taking our ambulance and drove it to the on base liquor store and ended up buying a trashcan full of beer and about four handles of whiskey and I don’t remember how much more alcohol we bought but it got to the point where nine of us were throwing up by the end of the night. ”

Informant’s Comments:

It was a lot of peer pressure by the older guys who had gone through it before and by the end we had their respect and they had ours. The people who didn’t do it didn’t really fit in after that.

Collector’s Comments:

This item was a kind of hazing done by the older people in the group to make sure that the younger people had their trust and also allowed the younger people to feel as though they had earned the respect of the new recruits.

Collector’s Name:  Cole Cable

Tags/Keywords: Warrior Night / Drinking / Navy / Sailors