The story and sound of a shared America

It’s been a minute since Bad Bunny reminded us that Canada, the US and Latin America all share claims to the same landmass. His declaration that all the countries in LatAm are American rocked the world, judging by how many posts, memes, reels and threads I’ve seen about his halftime performance.

But there are millions of other people who already knew it to be true. It seems to me that Latin Americans have always know they, too, are American. Years ago, almost decades, actually, while I was bartering with someone in Cartagena, Colombia, he told me that Colombians were Americans too. My clunky Spanish had tipped him off to my status as a Colombian-American, a term I came to hate after that conversation.

 I didn’t struggle with the phrase because he corrected me. I struggled because something in me knew he was right. “Colombian-American” suddenly felt less like an accurate identifier and more like a concession.

  It’s almost shameful to admit it, but until this man pointed it out to me, I’d never considered the obvious: that Colombia is America. So is Puerto Rico. So is Canada.  It’s a whole landmass.  Centered as I have been in the US narrative of American exceptionalism (which really means US exceptionalism), it had never crossed my mind that other places were America too.

Until that moment in my 20s I had never recognized that it is geography and geopolitics and the imperfection of English (and oh, yes, imperialism too) that separates us in the US from the rest of the Americans out there. That story of American exceptionalism started when the first colonizers of the US, the British who became British Americans and then just Americans, settled and “founded” the country I write this post from today.  It started when men (yep, men), inked words and colored in borders and imposed language without asking the people living there how they experienced their world.

 Historically, we in the US have loved that story and have overlooked all the other complications wrapped up in it. The First Peoples of this landmass have always known better, but at least today many of the rest of us are recognizing the problems with this singular claim to America.

Maybe one of the reasons we’ve been able to overlook those complications is linguistic. In the US, we use English to collapse an entire hemisphere into a single word that we want to own and control: America. Spanish, on the other hand, refuses that compression and control. Don’t get me wrong. Spanish has its own problems and it, too, is a language of colonizers and control. But in this case, hear me out.

 Spanish has a precise word for what we in the US are: estadounidenses. It is also a bit of a clunky word, but it works for me because everytime I say it, it slows me down. Saying it makes me think about identity and location and where I am in the world.  And in this slowing down, this clunkiness, exists something we all need to consider when we anchor ourselves or create others.  This slowing down is what we should do as we try to be precise and acknowledge multiple realities, and one singular one — that we’re all human.  

Uniting is a clunky process.

When we’ve been living under the ills of imperialism for so long, its goals of expansion, dominance, power and cultural takeover are all we know.  It’s hard to imagine anything else, or anything that can unite us with “the others” we’ve created.

Every day since the Benito Bowl I’ve thought about, or talked with someone about, how his music and  art and storytelling during the halftime show staged a cultural reclamation to transcend borders and tell a story of unity. This story allowed for e every element of the historical difficulties in PR (which is also a part of America) to have its own exceptionalism, its own power.

This is what art does.

This is why we need it now more than ever: to remind us across North and South America that we are all Americans, to remind us that two things can be true at once, that I can be Colombian and American, that I can speak another language and be an American. This reminds me that I can speak Spanish poorly and be Colombian, that we are all exceptional as humans.

A few years after it took place, I wrote a poem about that experience in Cartagena. I was teaching a poetry class and one of my students wrote a poem about her duel identity. The use of the word “duel” rather than “dual” was an accident, but it struck me as such a significant turn of phrase that during our next writing activity, I took a stab a writing my own “duel” identity poem.  Many drafts later it became “In which the Colombian-American poet contemplates dual existence.” I know we don’t hyphenate like this anymore, but back then we still did.

I won’t be sharing other poems in their entirety here because I want you to buy the book (!!) (please!!), but I’m sharing this one because the themes of conflict and joy and reclamation that arise out of that experience in Cartagena are woven through the entire collection.

And what I hope for with this book is that no matter where the duel is— Colombia and the US or Venezuela and the US or now Iran and the US, that we all slow down and think about the stories we tell about America, and the new words and even languages that we can maybe speak together, as humans.

In which the Colombian-American poet contemplates dual existence

Sometimes the chickens get sick, shit their guts out and starve with full stomachs, he tells me,

eyes on his prize rooster, the one

who fights to the death — so far, not his own.

I nod, my tongue, the first organ of nutrition, thick and dead in my mouth. If I speak,

I will give myself away — my own internal affliction.

His brown eyes shift to my brown face —

Where are you from, he asks, already certain.

Bogotá, I say, the á as hard and surprised as a 12 a.m. tarmac landing.

The raspy laugh is as strained as he — cock fighter, father, everyday hombre stuck somewhere between this and that. We’re alike more than we differ,

but suddenly I am uncomfortable.

Tu cara es Colombiana, pero…cuando abres la boca —

I shrug bare shoulders and wish for the power to expel myself from this situation.

It’s OK, he says, Colombians are Americans too.

For years I lashed razors against my dual identity, cutting out from under myself any sure footing.

The in-between of existence, the hyphen, the middle —

is both victory and loss for me.