Three days with 150+ Fulbrighters have left me wondering what exactly unites "Americans" beyond all being slightly strange.
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Fulbrighters in Salamanca's Plaza Mayor. "A Washingtonian, a Hoosier, and a New Yorker walk into a plaza..." |
The Spanish Fulbright Commission's web page has a section on "being a cultural ambassador" which warned us all before we came that:
"You may be wondering
how you can possibly represent “American culture” when the United
States is comprised of so many distinct cultures and backgrounds. The
richness and diversity of cultures in the U.S., however, is meant to be
represented in the Fulbright Program and its grantees – there is no
singular cultural background that grantees represent. Your cultural
experience in the United States is unique, and you were accepted to the
program in part because of your ability to serve as an ambassador for
it. In short, you are in Spain to represent your culture, however you define it, and to share it with the Spaniards you will meet."
The role of the cultural ambassador becomes challenging when you are viewed as a representation of all
American culture(s), and naturally there are many ways to be an
American that will not apply to you. Especially in the current political
climate, you will likely be asked to answer questions on behalf of all Americans (i.e. “How could you vote for this candidate?” or "Why are all Americans xenophobic?"). Remember in these situations that the you is usually not referring to you as individual at all, but rather to the United States as a whole.
Chatting with other Fulbrighters, I realize that I am insulated by being a New Yorker from some of these challenges, as the pair of Midwesterners I had lunch with Friday were lamenting that people immediately ask them about New York and they have to explain that they have never been there. ("And then they say, "why not?" and I say, "Umm, duh, because it's expensive," commented one biologist from Chicago, who noted that Boston seemed like a "very European" city to her.) Similarly, New Yorkers are saved some of the more embarrassing questions about politics, simply because New York City has its own foreign policy (and most foreigners don't know that New York State exists, which is its own problem, given that New York state has a larger landmass and population than quite a few EU member states), and there are regularly articles in the foreign press about Bill de Blasio and local New York politics. (Madrileños are finally starting to appreciate their wonderful metro system as the news of the existential crisis of the NYC subways leaks out into the outside world.) Meanwhile grantees from places like Indiana and Ohio really are forced to explain why the majority of people they live and interact with hold a series of beliefs that are quite different from the majority of Western Europeans.
On the other hand, I must admit that the Commission has chosen people well to represent the "richness and diversity of cultures in the US" since I've learned quite a bit. Everyone knows about the great soda/pop divide. (For the record, the correct term is "soda." "Pop" is a kind of music. Humph. New England/Mid-Atlantic States forever!) But I learned something from one young lady from Minnesota (currently teaching English in Galicia) who commented that she had only just learned that words and foods she thought of as standard were completely unknown in other parts of the US, and that other people used words she didn't understand. She gave the example of trying to explain "dessert bars" to her students. I assumed that by "dessert bar" she meant the equivalent of a salad bar, something like those spinning glass cases with many cakes in them which were so enchanting to me as a child, a literal buffet of desserts. But no, after some discussion it became clear that she was referring to a specific dessert, a kind of candy/cookie in "bar" form. I hadn't a clue. And apparently in the Dakotas "salad" is the term used for a sweet dessert, usually with jello (there's something called "pink salad") which I can only assume means that Dakotans don't eat vegetables. (Veggies certainly don't easily grow in that climate.) Then there was the Bostonian who referred to the difficulty of finding "bubblers" in Spain, and (facing the combined bewildered stares of a New Yorker and Arizonan) sheepishly explained that none of her roommates had understood either but she thought it was just them, and that maybe she meant a water fountain? (I quite like "bubbler" as a term for water fountain.) California is, as usual, its own state (or rather states) of mind (and as it currently has an economy the size of the UK, and a significant "Calexit" movement since the last presidential election, it hardly needs special vocabulary words).
One of the teaching assistants from Houston, who gave a charming presentation about her life in rural La Rioja, titled "11,524+1" (she lives in a village with 11,524 inhabitants...plus one single Fulbright grantee) said she was more or less prepared for people asking her if she rode a horse to school and how many pairs of cowboy boots she owned when they learned she was from Texas (answer: zero pairs of cowboy boots). However, she was innocently surprised to discover that in this village of 11,524 inhabitants "somehow everyone knew in advance that "la americana" was coming, so I was famous." At 2.3 million people Houston is half the size of Madrid, and the fourth largest city in the US. A prospering economy also means that it is extremely diverse, and attracts a significant number of immigrants from both within and outside the US. It had apparently never occurred to a young twenty-something that the arrival of a single foreigner in a town of under 15,000 in La Rioja would be greeted with more excitement than the arrival of many foreigners in her home city. (She has taken to her little village like a duck to water, by virtue of following the excellent principle that "I talk to anyone who talks to me" so she now is friends with half the village, in addition to being unable to go anywhere without her students excitedly yelling her name.) She seems in fact to be the exception, since in general the Fulbright commission has been pretty good (or applicants were fairly wise) in matching those from urban environments with urban environments, and rural with rural. (One Virginian and a few of the Midwesterners admitted to finding Madrid scary and overwhelming, while those of us from Chicago, Boston, and New York have by and large found it relaxing and pleasant. Similarly, those from the rural Midwestern plains are absolutely in love with the small towns of Asturias and Galicia, which have a similarly rural feel but are blessed with "mountains and sea" as one Plains grantee delightedly put it in her presentation, noting that she had difficulty imagining a town with either before her arrival.)
These strictly intra-US cultural differences are of course leaving aside any differences in ethnic and cultural background in addition to the vast differences between regions. As one family member of a grantee based in Granada put it, "my family is from Pakistan so I've been making a lot of Pakistani food when I'm homesick because that's what I have in Pennsylvania." A Mexican-born, US-naturalized historian went on a quest to find corn tortillas (not wheat flour) in Madrid, while the English-teacher son of Nigerian immigrants has been trying to unite his Nigerian and American heritage through his love of "stepping." (He did a presentation on the "step dance" club that he started at the school where he's teaching, and it was adorable to see how enthusiastic the kids were.) I've already written about my quest to find menorahs and dreidels in Madrid but not the poor chemist in Granada who has discovered that attending a seder means driving to Malaga. (She's still not sure what she's doing in the Spring.) Another historian of Mexican background admitted that he enjoyed pulling out the Fulbright letter because "let's face it, I get racially profiled here, and people think I can't be a real American, and I'm like "boom! Not only am I an American, I'm the fucking State Department Fulbright.""
Under these circumstances, I really have come to the conclusion that I am wiser to speak only for New Yorkers (and perhaps a bit by extension for parts of New England, since one Connecticut suburbanite admitted sheepishly that he said he was from New York City in Spain because it was so much cooler than saying he was from Connecticut....I told him that was ok, because I was sure there were Spaniards who claimed to be from Madrid rather than Majadahonda or Getafe or similar.) On the other hand, it remains mind-boggling to me that Europeans blithely assume that the US is "much more" culturally uniform and politically integrated than the EU. It was in fact a Belgian who wisely commented to me some years ago (after a road trip from New Orleans to New York) that he thought the political and social divisions within the US were in fact much deeper than anything in the EU, because in most of Europe the idea of social democracy and the role of government is basically accepted, while the arguments are over strategy and implementation, whereas in the US there are truly different visions not only about tactics but about the nature of what a government can and should be. There are also far deeper divisions in terms of what governments actually do or do not do in the US than between European countries. (Massachusetts has universal health care. New Orleans doesn't even have public schools - only charters. New York's gun control laws mimic those of most European capitals. In Virginia all you have to do to buy a gun is pay for it. Delaware is literally the equivalent of an offshore tax haven like the Cayman Islands and has no sales tax. Florida has sales tax but no income tax. New York has both. None of these are even a question mark anywhere in Europe. And that's leaving aside divisions within US states, like the New York City/New York State split, or the way - as a Pennsylvanian put it in Salamanca, "Pennsylvania has Philadelphia one side, and Pittsburgh on the other, and Alabama in between.") My Belgian friend noted that it was odd that such different people all called themselves "American" even when they had such basic and irreconcilable disagreements, whereas Europeans steadfastly insisted that there was no such thing as "Europe" even though in fact their disagreements were minimal.
I have repeatedly run across the "no such thing as European identity" line from Spaniards, Germans, Belgians, and others, who all at the same time (mysteriously) insist that their problems with immigration are because historically "we're not diverse like the US." I am not quite sure how to reconcile the (false) claim that on the one hand Europe has been historically all white and all Christian (let's be honest and admit that's what "we're not diverse" means) with the simultaneous insistence that it is far more diverse politically than the US. There is an essential contradiction here which is usually summed up as "yes, but the United States was born as a nation state and has always been unified," a beautiful fiction which ignores that half the country still calls the Civil War the "war between the states" (and that said war was the bloodiest to date when it was fought, and still involves strong feelings), not to mention the frank invasion and annexation of the northern half of Mexico (which somehow doesn't count as a "nation state" in the idealistic European version of US history), or the fact that as recently as the 1960s there was a serious question of whether state militias would defy federal troops enforcing desegregation orders. (A hell of a lot more serious than any doubts about the Catalan Mossos D'Escuadra, who promptly and completely obeyed orders when it was made clear to them that they really were supposed to. The Catalan Parlament is a good deal wimpier than state of Mississippi, or even the recalcitrant Poles, who after all - unlike Mississippians - believe that the government is supposed to provide certain basic social services, which leaves them vulnerable to the EU stopping their checks in a way that some US states are not, since they genuinely don't care whether the state government ceases to govern.)
Some of these meditations are inspired by a presentation in Salamanca by one of the senior Fulbright researchers (a professor of political science) who gave a ten minute presentation to a stunned and frozen audience about why Donald Trump's presidency really wasn't so bad. As a (very American) matter of principle, I will not give in to nativist sentiment and say that it was very clear that the gentleman in question wasn't a real American but only a naturalized German (he admitted himself that he had given up German citizenship to become American). But I will say that for a German born academic to get up an tell an audience of Americans (who included immigrants and children of immigrants from a number of countries which our esteemed president has eloquently described as "shitholes" not to mention Black Americans and grandchildren of refugees, like myself) that Trump's election was (a)unparalleled in Europe (ummmm....hello, AfD, FN, N-VA, Liga Nord, etc.?) and (b)not really about race was an act of some chutzpah. Because Fulbrighters are mostly nice young people who have been brought up to be polite to professors, and who understand that the nice people giving them money for a year in Spain expected them to listen politely, there was little more than vigorous shaking of heads during the presentation, and a spattering of polite applause when it was finished. But when a young man several rows behind me raised his hand during the question and answer period and asked (with a seriousness and intelligence which the presentation did not deserve) what lessons for democracy a pro-European who was seeking a closer European Union more along the US model might draw from the Trump election and ways to combat populism, the presenter (who in turn looked frozen and disapproving) said that he "did not believe there was a European demos and thus there could never be a European democracy" because Europe was "so much more diverse." Having this opinion stated by someone who was so clearly an idiot (and an idiot in bad faith, since he didn't even have the nerve to defend Trump per se but only defended the putative strength of American institutions) made me consider in more detail why it was a stupid opinion, hence these musings.
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Fulbright cocktail party at the Colego Arzobispo Fonseca |
The concept of the Fulbright in general, and of "person to person diplomacy" is in and of itself a somewhat odd idea, and certainly rooted in the general American concept that it's better to not leave government to professionals. (Though given the current American government it's possibly not a bad back up system.) At least the ferocious individualism of the Fulbrighters means that we resist becoming that most terrifying of abstractions, "the American people." The "people" (demos, volk, pueblo, poble, what have you) are a poison in the mouth of demagogues. We are just a collection of persons of good will, mildly amused to discover that we are subsumed into the category of American, but willing to freely ally with each other as individuals to keep the demagogues of "the people" at bay, and maybe meet a few individuals on this side of the Atlantic who can help us, and to whom we may be able to offer help and moral support as well.
It's amusing to speculate about how Senator Fulbright would have responded to these comments.
ReplyDeleteI suppose. But while the Senator's world shaped the one we live in for both good and ill, so much has changed in the last 60 years (and even the 23 since his death) that I suspect it would be like speculating on John Locke's reactions to the French Revolution. I assume the fine old Dixiecrat would be angered by even the small ethnic diversity the grants have achieved.
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