Are you an American? Do you know an American?
Growing up as a first generation American since my father was Sepharadic, I never felt a true sense of belonging to the jingoistic version of the American family. My dad had a thick accent like Desi Arnez, my mother was from New Orleans (a city several steps out of pace with America), and my formative years were spent living in a hotel, ordering room service or poolside cafe con leche and pan dulce in Managua, San Salvador, Panama, and Puerto Rico as my father moved our family from place to place working as a doctor – drawn gypsy like to the next place and able to work given an extensive Cuban medical community in exile.
My grandparents spoke Turkish, Spanish, Hebrew as well as English and my dinner table on any given day had either arroz con pollo, kibbeh, lavash, ropa vieja, yucca, tabbouleh, or red beans and rice. Not your typical American fare – which at the time meant tuna casserole, macaroni and cheese and meatloaf.
The definition of American changed enormously from the time I was a little girl till now. In my late twenties, I moved to Spain to go back to my roots; I thought I was finally going to be around my peeps and was sadly greeted by a nationalism I had never known in the good ole U.S. of A. The Spaniards were lovely but insular, and you could never be from “there” no matter how hard you tried (and despite having had a legacy that went back 500 years and even despite in 1992, Juan Carlos welcoming back the Jews who were kicked out in 1492).
I found myself in a circle of friends on the coast who were from England, Germany and France. Ex pats who had changed the landscape of the Spanish coast and virtually eradicated any signs of Spanish-ness – and even there, amongst the ex-pats, I felt that it was a daily diet of anti-Americanism, anti-Spanish, and anti-pretty much anything that wasn’t them-ism. It made me long to be home.
I came back and moved to California and began working on my master’s degree at Mill’s College where I studied Henry James. And I had an epiphany about who I was for the first time. I had spent my life at dinner tables trying to explain my heritage – Spanish Jew, Cuban, Turkish, Southerner, New Orleans – to so many people and it always sounded outlandish, chaotic, fragmented and partially made up. In fact, I realized one day walking among the eucalyptus trees on campus at Mills, I am an American because it is the only country that can hold my myriad identities.
Later, on the West Coast, when I met a woman from Hong Kong who spoke in such nationalistic terms of how Chinese this and that was better than anything American anything could be … Or in getting to know the Italian woman who married a friend and who pooh-pooh American food in favor of her own cheese (that she carried in her purse at all times), her own pasta, her own wine, her own language, and especially her grand dismissal of the American way of providing too many choices (latte, cappucino, espresso, decaf latte capuccino with two shots of espresso with skim milk) at every juncture … I was able to finally come to the dinner table and the conversation, content, knowing that when someone asked who I am, what I am, where I am from, there was one simple answer, I am an American.
May 5th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
You mean North American, right?
May 6th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Yes dear.