Beautiful reflection on immigrant family culture and colonialism! (Personal and irrelevant childhood note: in a Portuguese-Azorean and middle-American family, as a kid I was jealous of BOTH Italian and Irish friends. Two such large and wonderful American Catholic "clubs" to belong to. You hit the jackpot!)
I definitely appreciate having a connection - two of them - to distant lands and interesting people. If we look at it like clubs, I agree: they are both solid ones to be claimed by. Then again, in a "grass is greener" mindset, I think a Portuguese-Azorean background seems like you've won the newsmaking jackpot of exotic ancestry.
I remember taking a French class in France, as a foreigner trying to learn the language. On the first day we were asked to include our nationalities as we introduced ourselves in French. I went first and said I was "demi" (or half) Italian and "demi-Irlandaise." Nobody knew what to make of that. The instructor was looking for "je suis Americain" - the one place I came to France from - yet I was painting a picture of myself split in half straight down the middle, with my right half arriving in France by plane from Dublin to meet up with my left half that had possibly arrived in France by bus from Naples.
I think we Americans may reach farther back than most people to claim a national identity, culture, and heritage. Some of us will even say "I'm one-eighth this and a quarter of that and a smidge of yet another thing and..." - which would have truly melted the brain of my French as a Foreign Language instructor, not to mention how difficult that introduction would have been to formulate in French on the first day of class!
All of this joy of connecting back to far away and long ago brings me to a separate point about nationalities I didn't quite know how to allude to in this post, which would have described how Columbus presently dunks on all our neighbors whose ancestry points back to a theft of bodies as well to all their claims to their own fine-grained heritage which, based on a dearth of records, zooms out to nothing much more specific than the massive continent their people were taken from.
Yes, yes! Our Euro-American fascination and joy with tracing our "home" nationalities exists in uneasy contrast with the efforts of our ancestors (and today's anti-historians) to efface the heritage of our colonized sisters and brothers, including the native Americans we robbed. I think we sense that, unstated, in your essay. Slavery is a hell of a sin, but I wonder if our "original sin" doesn't go back even further, to the date the first European stepped onto the shores of the (to him) "New World" and claimed it as his own. I have trouble giving the Catholic Church credit, but I do think they were on to something with the concept of the never-to-be-shaken culpability for original sin.
Beautiful reflection on immigrant family culture and colonialism! (Personal and irrelevant childhood note: in a Portuguese-Azorean and middle-American family, as a kid I was jealous of BOTH Italian and Irish friends. Two such large and wonderful American Catholic "clubs" to belong to. You hit the jackpot!)
I definitely appreciate having a connection - two of them - to distant lands and interesting people. If we look at it like clubs, I agree: they are both solid ones to be claimed by. Then again, in a "grass is greener" mindset, I think a Portuguese-Azorean background seems like you've won the newsmaking jackpot of exotic ancestry.
I remember taking a French class in France, as a foreigner trying to learn the language. On the first day we were asked to include our nationalities as we introduced ourselves in French. I went first and said I was "demi" (or half) Italian and "demi-Irlandaise." Nobody knew what to make of that. The instructor was looking for "je suis Americain" - the one place I came to France from - yet I was painting a picture of myself split in half straight down the middle, with my right half arriving in France by plane from Dublin to meet up with my left half that had possibly arrived in France by bus from Naples.
I think we Americans may reach farther back than most people to claim a national identity, culture, and heritage. Some of us will even say "I'm one-eighth this and a quarter of that and a smidge of yet another thing and..." - which would have truly melted the brain of my French as a Foreign Language instructor, not to mention how difficult that introduction would have been to formulate in French on the first day of class!
All of this joy of connecting back to far away and long ago brings me to a separate point about nationalities I didn't quite know how to allude to in this post, which would have described how Columbus presently dunks on all our neighbors whose ancestry points back to a theft of bodies as well to all their claims to their own fine-grained heritage which, based on a dearth of records, zooms out to nothing much more specific than the massive continent their people were taken from.
Yes, yes! Our Euro-American fascination and joy with tracing our "home" nationalities exists in uneasy contrast with the efforts of our ancestors (and today's anti-historians) to efface the heritage of our colonized sisters and brothers, including the native Americans we robbed. I think we sense that, unstated, in your essay. Slavery is a hell of a sin, but I wonder if our "original sin" doesn't go back even further, to the date the first European stepped onto the shores of the (to him) "New World" and claimed it as his own. I have trouble giving the Catholic Church credit, but I do think they were on to something with the concept of the never-to-be-shaken culpability for original sin.