FEBRUARY 8, SUNDAY

AMERICAN SUPER BOWL

Since my month long visit to Uruguay two years ago, to Colombia a year and a half ago, to Mexico a year ago and again two weeks ago I have become very sensitive to the use of the word America. It has been pointed out again and again south of the border that America refers to both the North American continent and the South American continent and that everyone living on either continent is an American.

Certainly this is what Bad Bunny was so joyfully celebrating at the Super Bowl. We are all Americans from one end of South America to the arctic cirle.

But the word America and American poses a perceptual problem and a linguistic problem for me. The perceptual problem is revealed in the term, Native American, the people whose land North America was for thousands of years before European settlers claimed this land as their own, right from the beginning pushing out the people who had always lived here, and importing millions of slaves from Africa who weren’t considered American either. White European colonists most of the North American continent took the name American and excluded everyone who wasn’t white, even excluding the white British loyalists who were pushed into the coldest and least attractive land to the north. We who live in the center of North America seem to feel that we are the only inhabitants of the north and American continent who count and take the name American as our right. This is, I feel, part of our assumption of power and greatness and exceptionalism and patriotism.

We may not have intended to do this but it must be the way it appears to all of the other people living in the the two American continents.

It is certainly what Donald Trump intended when he changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and what his new Monroe doctrine claims for American dominance of both north and South America. But ironically, his name change probably reflects the truth, the gulf he refers to is not a Mexican gulf or a USA gulf or a Caribbean gulf, it is the gulf of all of America, north and south, the American gulf, the Gulf of America.

So if the perception problem is caused by the USA claiming the title of American for itself, the second problem is linguistic, how do I refer to myself or the people who live in the United States, the USA. Are we USAians or United Statesians? We are so used to calling ourselves Americans and having other people call us Americans that we don’t have any other word. We can call ourselves citizens of the USA, but that is cumbersome. We could be called Yankees except that that is too narrow and leaves out the South. There currently even a MAGA attempt to claim that only people who have been here several generations are really American. But if we arn’t going use that word except to refer to everyone living on both American continents then we do we call those heritage citizens of the USA? Right now we are torn apart by whom we consider entitled to live in our part of North America. We make it hard to get American citizenship and then want to throw out everyone who doesn’t have it. Yet we are all descended from immigrants, the native Americans just immigrated first.

It seems to me we just have to start over and find new words to describe those of us living within the boundaries of the USA. Maybe we could say that we are all, north and south, east and west, human, all equally important, and downplay the tribal names we give ourselves. It seems to me that this was what Bad Bunny’s halftime show was celebrating. In North and South America we are all one, we are all Americans, we are all human beings with vibrant cultures that should be celebrated.

I glanced at some at the Kid Rock alternative halftime show and it seemed to state the opposite. Only inhabitants of the United States are true Americans and it is only this culture that should be honored and celebrated. That pains me.