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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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When your country is so young, nearly everybody is an immigrant. So it's hard to take pride in a family lineage that is at most 4 generations of being American. Plus, we don't really have a unified national identity. "American" could literally mean every type of person.
funny that you say that, not all Europeans are stuck in the same nationality for 10 or 30 generations back, maybe not even majority.
My great-grandmother was German, never learned the language of what is now my nationality. My grandmother and her child (my parent) didn't speak German and have never subscribed to German nationality, neither do I (but I speak a little bit German though becouse of school not because of family). Maybe it's because the identity of the place I live in is as strong as Germany's so it's a simple choice. But for a country, whose entire schtick is "'Murica fokk yea" I am sometimes baffled how much this ancestral identity matters among people who are supposed to benefit from the whole thing (white middle/upper classes).
I suspect that's because Europe is hugelly varied whilst the United States are, in what's actually almost twice area, much less varied in terms of culture and values (for example, the whole of North American has all of 3 main languages - with English clearly dominant - whilst Europe has over 20 main ones plus another 80 or so minor ones).
Living in Europe it's very likely that you'll actually cross paths with and even know well people from the country of your ancestors (plus from lots of other quite different countries) and lose all illusions that you're culturally the same, whilst in the US one can live in blissfull ignorance thinking eating spaghetti and having an Italian great-grandfather makes them a lot like Italians, never actually having met and gotten to know well an actual modern italian.
It's actually funny: people within a specific cultural environment have a tendency to spot in great detail everybody's slight differences, which for outsiders are pretty closed to unremarkeable, and it's only when you go live elsewhere do you notice all those "great differences" were nothing at all compared to the differences in people between countries, at least in Europe. It's actually funny how for example my keen spotting of regional differences in my home nation of Portugal (which is tiny yet even that one has such things) suddenly became silly when I moved to The Netherlands, by comparisson with the great differences in people between the two countries, and ditto when I moved to England, and then as I lived longer and longer in those countries I started spotting the regional difference in people within those countries (and in the special case of Britain, the differences between people from the various nations also became sharper in my eyes).
I suppose things like an Italian-American subculture come from that keen spotting of what for outsiders are quite small differences and then that mixed with profound ignorance on the subject matter makes many confuse being "an American with a drizzle of Italian" with being part Italian.
Mind you, it's all valid. It's just that for me who have lived in a couple of countries in Europe, been to quite a few more, can speak several european languages and know people who actually grew in various countries in Europe, that kind of identification with the nation of one's ancestors in the US looks quite ill-informed.
No, this is an American thing. Other countries in the American continent have the same immigrant thing going on and we don't call ourselves Italian or whatever. We are all from the country where we were born.
This is a miss on one of the best parts of America.
This is a country of immigration and everyone has a story and a different background.
Ummm... The US was built on immigrants, what other American country is? Look at early era NY, I don't know any other country in America built off a huge influx of diversity like that. It was how the US grew, through immigration. But I'm open to being wrong if you could show me any.
For example, South/Central American countries all have their own deep, rich, and most importantly, long history of culture and heritage. The US does not, outside Native Americans that is.
What the hell? All countries in the continent are about the same age. Europeans after the wars fled to lots of different countries. Sao Paulo, Brazil, for example, has the largest number of Japanese immigrants in the world. My ancestors came from Italy, Hungary, Spain, and Portugal.
Maradona, the great Argentine football player, descended from native American, Spanish, Italian and Croatian ancestors. Another Argentine footballer, Lionel Messi, descended from Italian and Spanish immigrants. Bolsonaro, shitty ex-president of Brazil, has an Italian surname. He won the previous election against Fernando Haddad, who has a Turkish surname.
It's not about age. The US is a blend of cultures without a real single identity. It is very different than say Brazilian history, which is much older than the US.
Brazil was originally settled by stone-age tribes. In 1500, Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral arrived in Brazil with 1,200 adventurers. Cabral claimed Brazil as a colony of Portugal. The first settlement was founded in 1532. Which is a few hundred years sooner than the US and not established with multiple peoples she cultures.