calling him or herself 'American' is equivalent to people from the U.S. As one Argentine friend explained, "Someone from the U.S. citizen, informed me (I guess I had never noticed) he has always replied "the U.S." when asked where he is from, because for Latin Americans, saying one is "American" is a vague identifier.īeyond vagueness, "American" also can be interpreted as a loaded term when verbalized by people from the U.S. Meanwhile, my father, a first generation Mexican immigrant and U.S. I was surprised that America, in fact, referred to the U.S.A." and people talked about 'America,' I thought they were referring to the continent. "The opposite happened to me," she replied. When researching this piece, I reached out to my professor at the time Nathalie Bouzaglo, an assistant professor in the Spanish department and native of Venezuela, to recount this anecdote. For some ears it even evokes memories of U.S. Martí is undoubtedly speaking to and about Latin America and its people, and I had launched into the text assuming he was about to expound on his perception of the United States of America. Martí urges the people of "América" to join together, strengthen the region and be proud of who they are and what is theirs-an echo of Simón Bolívar's tenets when crusading to unite the entire region in the early 1800s. It came when reading Cuban politician José Martí's seminal 1891 essay "Nuestra América" in a Spanish literature class. I did have a moment of realization in college, though, that people outside the 50 United States also laid claim to the terms. I was unaware of how nuanced "America" and "American" were before moving to Argentina in September 2010.
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