A way with words
When I was doing an internship in the Dominican Republic, I found people’s perceptions on the composition of the U.S. very interesting. Everyone knew someone or had lived in New York, Miami, and/or Boston, and anything outside of that was a mystery. It reminded me of those maps they sell in Harvard Square, “America according to a Bostonian,” where Cambridge and its landmarks are huge in proportion to the rest of the country, with New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco slightly smaller, while the entire Midwest is snottily narrowed to “flyover land.” One small boy once asked me, “Are you from New York, Boston, or America?” I tried to explain that New York and Boston were part of America, but that didn’t seem to fly with him. These were separate, known entities to a Dominican, and “America” was a mythical, unreachable construction in comparison. Also interesting was that in the D.R., the U.S. is exclusively referred to as “America,” while representing only one country in one of America’s two continents, furthering its larger-than-life image.The Ethiopian diaspora has created similar such repositories of specialized knowledge about the U.S. Many Ethiopians seem to have lived in or have relatives living in one of three locations: San José, California; Houston, Texas; and the one everyone already knows about, Washington, D.C. (yay Adams Morgan!) Many Ethiopians end up in Texas, somehow, which strikes me as rather funny, but then the U.S. is full of such seemingly incongruous pairings, and is in fact built on the resulting dynamics: Hmong in Wisconsin, Sudanese in Burlington, Bantu Somalis in Utica. Amel was describing some of her friends who had spent years in Texas and actually came back with a drawl, and while pegging them as having become “more American than Americans,” she called them “galvanized Americans.” Like the pots, or the cowboy hats. It made a ridiculous amount of sense to me. And how perfect for referencing Texas! Who was it that said that traveling does not open your eyes to other cultures as much as it opens your eyes to your own?
posted by Margot @ 8:26 AM
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