I am talking about those Americans that where born and raised there but call themselves latinos because their great grandparents come from Latin America. No, you are an American, that’s it. I don’t get this, I am Mexican with spanish citizenship but I don’t go around saying I am spanish-mexican because it sounds stupid, I am Mexican because this is where I was born and raised and I am proud of it.
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Because you can be American and another subculture, like any other culture. It isn’t that odd especially when you’re in a country full of immigrants.
Cool that it sounds stupid to you, but to many others, it isn’t stupid to like and indulge of both of your cultures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicano
And more generally…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Americans
Please read up.
I don’t use the term ‘Chicano’ for myself (it’s kind of dated now), but Mexican-American culture generally is a thing. Believe me, we *know* what Mexicanos think of us, but we don’t care. We are an American subculture that exists in America, that is unique to America, the difference being that grandma lives 4 hours to the south rather than on the other side of the ocean.
You want us to be like Joe McCowboy from Oklahoma so that we can fit your notion of what an ‘American’ is supposed to be. Well, too bad.
Why do you care
I think this is a fundamental lack of understanding of what people mean when they said “I’m Irish-American”. They’re not going to Ireland and saying “I’m Irish, just like you!” They are saying that their family can be traced to Ireland.
Also, the Latino comment seems particularly strange. There are MANY Latinos here who are very much first or second generation Americans. They speak Spanish when they are home. They have relatives that they visit in Latin America. Usually, we get people from Europe getting up in arms about some dude saying that they’re German-American or someone from Africa saying African-Americans aren’t African, but i think this is the first time I saw someone from North America say it. I mean, Mexico is **right there**. It’s not hard to believe that alot of Latinos still have strong connection to their ancestral home.
US exists, and always has existed, as various nationalities living and working closely. so we developed a tendency to be specific about where we were from, even when sharing the same goal. the tendency never went away. it hasnt had much time to. people love to shit on us for being a young country but then conveniently forget that we are a young country when its time to shit on us for something else they dont like about us.
in a more general sense, humans are not amoeba. we are complex and many events and experiences combine to make us who we are. ethnicity and culture arent binary. you don’t pick one or the other. claiming one isnt denying the other. from an american’s perspective, what you’re saying is no more logical than if someone were to say “why do so many doctors play basketball on the weekend? seems stupid to me, dont they know theyre doctors?”
its likely that the real reason this sounds stupid to you is because you are assuming america and american cultures are much more homogeneous than they are.
My question for you is why you feel the need to invalidate people’s love of their heritage?
Why does it offend you?
I know a lot of Mexican immigrants who are either first, second, or third generation. Of course they are American. They are also Latino and carry a lot of Mexican culture with them.
It would be much more strange if someone immigrated here from Mexico and got rid of all their traditions and culture.
For example I grew up going to a Catholic Church that had a Spanish mass because there were a ton of Mexican and Guatemalan families that went to my church. Of course they kept a shit ton of Latino heritage ranging from holidays, food, religious practice, and language. That is supremely American. My family keeps family traditions that originated with our German or Irish heritage. Why wouldn’t a Latino family do the same. I can also guarantee that someone whose parents are from Mexico has a lot of cultural stuff in common with Mexicans even though they are born and raised in the US.
So I’m Puerto Rican. For all technically purposes I am American, but by history and many text, it is still considered a Latin American location. So am I Latino or American?
But also in a lot of North American paperwork when they ask for heritage its always are you:
White,
Black,
Hispanic/Latin American
Asain
Other
Up here the two have become one and the same. It has become more of a culture for those with roots in south America. My sisters who were born here consider themselves have Latino/American. End of the day we are all human and thats what matters most. I love my Mexican brothers as I would my Mexican American brothers and both are Latino to me. If you got the heart and spirit thats all for me.
Immigrants all around the world tend to hold two things dearly simultaneously: their new nationality and the cultural norms they were raised with, especially if the two don’t have a ton of similarity. This is kind of a basic point that goes well beyond the US of A.
If you’re genuinely confused about that, it may be time to re-evaluate how stifling that sort of attitude is for ethnic minorities in one’s own country.
TL;DR We don’t try to be anything we’re not as far as self-identity. We’re simply proud of what got us here. Why do you care?
USA isn’t culturally homogeneous like many other countries, and we were literally built by immigrants. Some of our greatest people *eg* Arnold Schwarzenegger (Austrian) or the late Alex Trebek (Canadian) naturalized as Americans because they love this country so much, and heritage is as important as citizenship when you might not have much more than memories of where you or your family came from to get here.
You’ve been complaining about this for hours on various subs. The American ability to live rent free in people’s heads will never cease to amaze me.
So someone who was born in El Paso and grew up speaking Spanish with their Mexican parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, eating food and recipes their family brought over from Mexico, and visiting family back in Mexico quite often would be *completely different* from someone born 10 miles away in Juarez just because it’s a different country, and can’t claim *any* amount of Mexican culture? They may not have been born and raised in Mexico, but you can still be proud of where the culture you were raised as comes from.
That’s an extreme example because of how close they are. But that works for others too. Someone who grew up in Chicago to Polish parents, speaking Polish, eating Polish food, and living in a neighborhood where almost everyone else is in a similar situation, can’t claim any connection to Polish culture?
Maybe your biggest understanding is that people aren’t claiming to be *not* American. It’s just a way to identify general groups that have shared cultures/experiences within the US. A Mexican-American in New Mexico likely grew up quite differently from a Chinese-American who grew up in New York City.
I’ll never understand why this is so triggering to non-Americans. It’s not even specific to America. Pretty much most of the New World does this to some degree.
No one is talking about nationality. They are talking about ancestry. We are a nation of immigrants, and by and large those immigrants have come in waves, and then settled in the same areas. The Irish here, the Italians there, the Polish there, Mexicans here, etc, etc etc. As such “immigrant identity” is a thing, and is just a part of our culture.
We currently have 50 million people living here born elsewhere. Add in first generation born here 80 million. Over half our population has at least one foreign born parent or grandparent. That’s 165 million.
Just to give an example of how influential immigrants can be in 1900 it is estimated that there more people born in Ireland who were living in the US than there were people living in Ireland.
Latino isn’t a nationality.
Saying you can’t be Latino and an American is like saying a red car can’t be both red and a car.
We have many subcultures, and they often have both traits of the surrounding American culture and traits of the culture their immigrant relatives did. They are not pretending to be from another country. An American talking to another American might drop the American part because it’s a given and saying (Insert ethnicity)-American is a mouthful. Mexican-Americans have their own unique subcultures.
Obviously the answer is for everyone to obliterate any example of different cultures borrowed from other countries.
Do we have to rename TexMex now, too?
Oh, did St Patrick’s Day come early this year?
I’ll keep it extremely brief. Immigrants to the US tended to cluster together with others from their own country for support and familiarity, and often settled in enclaves. Irish in South Boston, Italians in Little Italy, Cubans in Miami. Within these enclaves they would usually maintain as many of the old language and customs as they could. Outside of these enclaves they usually faced discrimination. That combination of isolation, reverence for heritage, and resentment at discrimination led to the development of certain subcultures that persist over time.
So then we say things “I’m Irish” or “I’m Irish-American,” we mean it in that context. That we’re Americans whose experience is tempered through a certain diaspora in America.
By the way, this exact thing happens in Canada, the UK, and a dozen or so other counties. Why is it always Americans who take heat for it?
Americans seperate ethnicity and nationality into two seperate aspects of a person. American is a nationality but it is not an ethnicity. We don’t ask people to abandon their cultural heritage when they become American. In fact, we encourage them to embrace it. It isn’t just Latinos this happens with. Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Korean-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and many other group proudly embrace their heritage while still firmly being American.
We are being who we are. We are being American. We are a diaspora. Acknowledging our ancestral heritage is part of that. Even a portion of the Indigenous population is of mixed ancestry. If the rest of the world can’t accept that, it’s not our problem.
Because we’re not simply Americans. There are people native to this continent and they look nothing like me.
Oh look, yet another foreigner who doesn’t understand difference between nationality and heritage.
Plenty of people have already explained better than me why some people in America define themselves this way. So I’ll just add how people define themselves has nothing to do with you. Maybe you should explore why you take it so personally. It’s not that serious.
>I am Mexican because this is where I was born and raised and I am proud of it.
Cool. If your kids/grandkids/great grand kids are born in another country, would you want them to be proud of their Mexican heritage like Mexican Americans are or would you prefer they didn’t mention it too much?
So that’s the thing about the US not being an Ethnostate, basically it allows you to be a [insert culture/ethnicity here]-American, you see a similar pattern in other ethnically diverse countries like Canada, the UK and even India (based on state).
Genealogy is of greater interest to Americans than other less diverse countries. You don’t seem to understand the difference between ethnic heritage and nationality. It would be easily understood if you lightly researched the topic.
1. Because the *vast* majority of Americans have ancestry from another part of the world, so the concept of being a mix of two or more cultures is just totally normalized across the entire country. Gonna be a total dork and quote Schoolhouse Rock: “*go on and ask your grandma, hear what she has to tell, how great to be American, and somethin’ else as well*”
2. Many of these Americans who were born and raised here as you say have either parents or grandparents who were born somewhere else. If you have Spanish citizenship and Spanish culture was a huge part of your identity and experience growing up, I don’t know why it would be weird or stupid at all to call yourself Spanish-Mexican. If you choose not to, then great, that’s your choice.
3. We are honoring family members who would want us to remain connected to our heritage. I am Cuban-American. I honor the sacrifice and hardship my family endured to build a life here, and I know that they would never want me to forget where we came from just because I was born and raised here. I would want the same for my children if I immigrated somewhere else. If *you* came to America and had kids, would you want them to be like “no no no no no, I am NOT Mexican-American. I am just *American*”?
4. Why the heck do you care? You seem to have an axe to grind against what you perceive as immigrants and their descendants misrepresenting their countries of origin. What a gigantic generalization. The Mexican-American community, for example, is HUGE and incredibly diverse. Everyone has a right to live their life and tell their story. Why is it any of your business how other people identify?
You have a flaw in your definition.
Latino isn’t a country. It’s a reference to people from a region who share some similarities in language, culture, genetics and food.
Are Guatemalans the same as Argentinians? No. And yet both are Latinos. So why is it so surprising that people in the US, many of whom were born there, also refer to themselves as Latino?
Beyond this, America is a country built on immigrants. It’s heterogeneous. And we continue to lead the world in immigration every year. It’s a tough thing to uproot yourself and move to a different country, and so people tend to retain parts of the culture they left behind. For 2 generations, they still speak the language and honor those traditions. They’re still proud of being American, but it’s possible to be proud of both.
I’m a Chinese-American, and I see myself as 100% American. The way I see it, the ethinity is simply an acknowledgement of my background, and a validation of a fundamental idea of “anyone has the potential to be American”.
American is not an ethnicity, it is a nationality. The United States is a nation of immigrants, and with the exception of a certain subset of people who are extremely anti immigration and anti diversity, a vast majority of Americans support, or atleast willing to acknowledge the fact that diversity and multi culturalism are a strength, and a fundamental building block of this country.
Americans of different ethnic origins identify as “Ethnic-American” because our assimilation process does not require, or even recommend completely erasing one’s heritage. Even for “unfriendly countries” such as China and Russia, immigrants from those places can still keep their language, cuisine, customs, and traditional holidays etc, but we strongly prefer they leave their native land’s politics behind, so they can identify with the constitution and appreciate fundamental American values. If someone is an American born citizen of any ancestry whose family might have been in this country for generations, then they are naturally culturally American; the acknowledgement of the ethnic background does not mean rejecting “Americanism”, it just shows America is a country that is willing to accept and honor people of all backgrounds, and no one should be ashamed of their heritage.
If you dig deeper into American history, you will understand the “Ethinic American” convention has had a rather sombering past. Right now, people can be proud and secure about who they are, but that has not always been the case. For example, Chinese-Americans were not allowed to naturalize as American citizens during the Chinese Exclusion Act, so I think you might be able to understand where “Chinese-American” might have originated from. Without going into more details, many ethinities have been discriminated against before, and it was not easy for them to become, and be considered just American in the past. But this country has progressed in terms of acceptance and tolerance, so whichever group might have been alienated “Ethnic-American” in the past, we now, as a whole, honor them as a fundamental and inalienable part of our American nation and our shared American history. No one’s heritage should stop them from being 100% American, so no one needs to hide their heritage either.
Non Americans have the hardest time with this one. When I visited Belize with my teenagers, just to use one example, the guide asked me “where were we from.” I said America. He said we didn’t *look* like Americans. (We’re Jewish. We look Arabic. We tend to dress bohemian-style lol) I asked him what Americans “look like,” and he just said we didn’t look like it, and kept asking us what we were.
When I repeat this story to Americans, the biggest reaction is confusion–Americans don’t ‘look like’ anything. We come from 100s of different cultures, ethnicities, and races.
When people say they’re Latino, for instance, they’re not saying they’re not American. THey’re American. They’re saying they have Latino heritage and part of their identity is from that culture.
We’re not homogenous like most of Europe has been up till recently, and even now Europe is a whole lot more homogenous than America is. We are proud of our various cultures, ethnicities, heritage. It’s part of what *makes* us Americans imo.
Did you ever watch Italian movies? Goodfellas? The Godfather, etc. Did you ever notice how they retain their culture?
That’s what happens in America. Unless you fully blend in like English from the 1600s, or you try to blend in, your family will retain a lot of the culture it comes from.
My grandfather still spoke with an Irish accent and cadence and that was from several generations ago.
In Germany, Turkish people aren’t really considered German until they conform to a very long list of demands, according to one German Redditor. This is something I’ve noticed after living in the country for awhile as well. They’re considered Turkish, not German, despite being born in and raised in the country.
In the US, they’d be considered American right away. But American culture is absolutely not the culture they brought with them, is it? They brought with them Turkish culture, recipes, and history. They might consider themselves Turkish-Americans, shortened to just Turkish since we don’t need to remind ourselves we’re American.
For Italians who immigrated to the US, they didn’t bring American culture with them either. They brought Italian culture, recipes, and history with them to the country.
It’s the same for other immigrant groups as well, including Mexican-Americans. They brought their culture, their recipes, and their history with them when they immigrated.
So, we’ve just omitted the -American part. Remind yourselves that there’s an -American part not being mentioned, Italian-American, for example, and it’ll be fine. Americans don’t need a reminder.
We’re all from somewhere, we’re often proud of our heritage. Everyone can be American….most countries are not as accepting. I can’t move to Mexico and say I’m Mexican, but you can move to America and say you’re American. We’re a nation accepting of foreigners become Americans.
You are making a mistake. You are confusing nationality (Being American) with Ethnicity (your familial heritage).
Bruh, se te permite que no te gusten los estadounidenses, lo entiendo. Pero vamos, tienes que saber que tu argumento no tiene sentido because heritage and nationality are different in literally every country??
Nadie está diciendo que los Mexican Americans hablen por todos los mexicanos. Dijiste que no te gusta cómo te representan los Mexican Americans…¿y porque? What about them irks you?
It sounds like you’re upset because A) You don’t like Americans (again, eso es justo) and B) You’ve fallen for some of the anti-Mexican American propaganda that the Right in the US is pushing and exporting around the world.
There is a difference between ethnicity and nationality. You can be a certain ethnicity and still born in the US. There are Russians born in Estonia, Swedes born in Finland, Irish born in the UK, Japanese born in Australia, etc. Etc.
I don’t get why it’s so hard to understand. Mixed ethnicities are all over the globe
Latino is an ethnicity, which means “the quality or fact of belonging to a population group or subgroup made up of people who share a common cultural background or descent”. You’re the first person I’ve ever heard arguing against Americans using that term because citizenship and race doesn’t determine ethnicity.
I get people are annoyed about Americans claiming to be Italian when their great great grandparents came from Italy but they actually have no connection or knowledge of it. But the example you’re using is weird
I’m Australian (but live in the US now) and I can tell you Australia is a multicultural country and you always hear people referring to themselves as to where their grandparents/great grandparents come from. It’s harmless. I don’t even see how it’s annoying lol. It’s more annoying listening to people ask why Americans always do things when it’s things that happen in multiple countries lol.
Do you understand what the word “heritage” means? 🤨
Googling for the definition of Latino:
> especially in the US) a person of Latin American origin **or descent**, in particular a man or boy.
Emphasis was added by me
Wouldn’t you?
EDIT: with love from Queens.
Unlike most countries, the United States was not founded as an ethnostate. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, I just mean that the US’ history as a nation of immigrants is different from say, Bulgaria or Vietnam. Americans have heritage from all around the world and are proud of the stories and traditions of their ancestors. I happen to be one of those people who is both American and Latino (of Mexican heritage). Just because the border moved around 1850 doesn’t mean that my ancestors living in what became Texas lost their cultural identity. I’m not saying I’m a Mexican citizen, but I get to be proud to be Latino and part of the mosaic of people throughout the Americas with Hispanic heritage.
I should have a copy-and-paste reply for every time this comes up. The last time I went on for quite a while. I’ll make it shorter this time.
If you grow up in America as part of an ethnic community, your experience is fundamentally different than other Americans, and as a result you yourself are fundamentally different. Native-born Americans have more similarities than they do differences, but there are absolutely differences.
Here’s one example: You know the famous New York accent? You may not have ever talked to somebody with one but you’ve heard it in countless movies and TV shows. Well, there isn’t one New York accent. There’s an Italian New York accent, and a Jewish New York accent, and a Puerto Rican New York accent, and a Chinese New York accent. They’re actually different accents. And if your Italian ancestors came to America in the 1880s, you’ve still got the Italian version.
People of Italian descent call themselves “Italian” because they have different accents and eat different foods and use different slang and celebrate holidays differently and are more likely to name their kids different things. And on and on and on. It’s a distinct identity and it needs a name.
We don’t call them subcultures we call them “Communities” the Asian, Latino, Sikh, Jewish… Communities… they gather together for religious and cultural traditions.
A Subculture is like Grateful Dead or Rave Culture, Goth, Off-Grid, RV. Etc.
La·ti·no
[ˌlaˈtēnō, ləˈtēnō]
NOUN
(especially in the US) a person of Latin American origin or **descent**, in particular a man or boy. See also Latina.
They call themselves Latinos because they fit the definition. Do Latin American dictionaries have a different definition?
I was born and raised in the US. When I go to Mexico, you guys still call me “Chino.”
So…you tell me, buddy.