When I lived in Manhattan, I opened a checking account in the Citibank of Park Avenue with 32. Without even looking at the passport, employee of the window automatically wrote next to my name: country, Mexico. Until the Olympic Games of Barcelona, Americans did not begin to know in small doses that Spain was in Europe, continent that neither impresses them as a whole. Americans spend so much of what happens beyond its borders that the Baseball League finals called world series and the winner of the NBA consider him world champion. Therefore, nor annoyed me years before, in Seattle, in explaining that Spain was not any South American Republic.
I was concerned a little more when someone allegedly aware, told me: you, of course, were allies of France during the second war world I was speechless and only was right to answer: well no. Spain has not participated in the large international contests. Our specialty is the kill us among ourselves; why we dedicate ourselves more to the civil wars. Until my interlocutor, restore I added: by the way: our last foreign war was precisely against you, to account for Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. But that one hundred years ago.
You are kidding me. At all. And you know, for your peace of mind, that war you won it. None of us remembers such conflict that, if anything, our great grandfathers lived. But there it is, in the collective unconscious, the ominous loss of the last Spanish colonial remains before the budding Yankee imperialism of the time. The American people ignored that and almost everything else that happens in the USA, said, because the United States is in itself a vast continent that neither own Americans have time to know. Who has ever been in North Dakota, where there are no are potential nor losing is by the way? All this paraphernalia typically American to sing the national anthem before sporting events, lined with starry flags competitions for rodeo or learn in school whole chapters of the Constitution is not a… strain of patriotism, but the conviction of that what better to be an American citizen? That is something by which the grandparents and great-grandparents of today Americans; have fought It is what sucks the million Lake of new citizens are naturalized each year, which is what they dream of the hundreds of thousands of wet backs clandestinely crossing the border with Mexico every year. Send its troops to Iraq, or Somalia, or the island of Grenada, is therefore, for the Americans, carry with them the concept of freedom of culture, understanding of life that do not understand that someone may not share. To us, on the other hand, such banner without coming to story, so much complacency Hollywood movies, so much unsolicited generosity, so much arrogance from a country with little more than two hundred years of history, which proposes the only english in schools, which has discriminated against chicanos and Puerto Ricans and Oslo with Tirana, which geographically confused us sounds pure and simple imposition. If only for this reason, Americans and we still take, unfortunately, long time to come to understand us.