Post

Verdant Haven wrote:

Really, I think that particular Americanism (identifying fractionally as various nationalities) is mostly reflective of a generalized desire to understand where we came from. The USA is a very young nation, and still has numerous extant native populations - simply saying "I'm American" does not accurately respond to a general curiosity about one's personal history. Unlike some European countries that contributed significant number if immigrants to the US population, very few people here can say "my family has been here for 500 years." In fact, nobody but our indigenous populations can say that. Many Americans, probably most if I had to guess, have ancestors who arrived recently enough that aspects of their upbringing were affected by the culture of that ancestor's previous country.

Terrabod wrote:

Well, that's undoubtedly one of two reasons that the American interest in genealogy has developed so differently to other countries (even compared to other nations settled by immigrants like Canada and Australia). The other is less palatable; in the wake of the American Civil War, having a well-researched record of one's ancestry was a way of justifying and enforcing the social hierarchy. To be able to prove that one's ancestors arrived from Germany, England, Scotland, Sweden (read: to prove that one's bloodline was pure) was to use genealogy as a weapon of exclusion and a vehicle for white supremacy. Of course, I'm not trying to argue that's still the case with America's present-day interest in ancestry which has clearly evolved post-civil rights to something of a shared national hobby

It's interesting to contrast that american genealogy thing with how things work in this very unusual nation I live in. In Brazil, not only did we have the "three races myth" (an understanding that the archetypical Brazilian was formed after centuries of peaceful miscigenation between "Africans, natives and whites") as a cultural staple, we also had it as effectively an institutional guiding rule for policies and such. The whitening theory during the late 19th century is probably the best example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_whitening Brazilian eugenicists had some very different ideas to other eugenicists. Our largest wave of imigration (excluding slave trade) was of poor europeans, with the explicit intention to have them breed with the local population so the offspring would be whiter. It's absurd to imagine something like this happening in the US for example.

Saying you're 1/32th scottish here is not unheard of, but very rarely brought up. If you're born here then (informally) you're either just "white", "black", most likely some shade of "moreno" and, rarely, "asian" or "indian". The people who bring up their heritage in terms of nations (like in the scottish example) are almost always white middle-to-upper class, and it's seen as a snobbish way to try and seem "european", and thus somehow noble. That's not always the case (for example, my grandfather, a son of peasant italian migrants, keeps his heritage very close to his heart), but saying you're not 100% brazilian is seen as a way to try and distance yourself from other people and to seem superior. And I'm not even going to get into the Mongrel Complex thing because that's barely related to the topic at hand.

The "three races myth" is probably a good response to the desire to understand our origins that Verdant Haven mentioned that could only have happened here. "Where did we come from?" "From the peaceful and democratic mixture of these three arbitrary racial divisions" and then leave it at that.

And I can only imagine how it's like in the rest of latin america, because Brazil has, as I mentioned in another post, very distinct and complex racial relations, which are very different from the rest of L.A. However, spanish colonization was also very different from british colonization on the americas. Like with the US, very few people here can say "my family has been here for 500 years." However, in a country like Bolivia, where 44% of the population self-identifies as indigenous and almost 88% are in some way direct descendents of indigenous peoples, the number of families living there for 500 years will be a lot higher. The way colonization affected the understanding of heritage here in the americas is so so interesting...

Murmuria wrote:

Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso said that the U.S. are the country that took the name of a continent. In his opinion, that is incorrect and unfair. They're all American, from Alaska to the Tierra del Fuego.

Yeah, in Brazil (and the rest of south america) the continent is just called "america", with the division between central, south and north americas. People from the US aren't called "americanos", they're called "estado-unidense" (united-stater or something similar)