Enrique, well, may be your ‘check’ wasn’t good enough. If you’re not from the US, you’re NOT American!
Try telling a European/Asian/Australian, etc. (you get my drift) that you’re American and then present your Mexican or other country-of-origin passport from South America and see them laugh at you!
Because you’re NOT ‘American’ if you’re FROM South America, Mexico, or Canada.
If you’re from South America, then you’re a South American. Now I see ‘chip-on-the-shoulder’ issue with lots of Mexicans and other South Americans who take up the issue and want to be known as ‘Americans’. First, the convention is that we do not normally associate ourselves as belonging to a certain continent. Normally everyone is ‘from somewhere’ as if from a certain ‘country’; like, Sweden, Germany, etc.
I remember debating with my Mexican friend in college who was all up in arms and wanted to be ‘known’ and ‘accepted’ as American when he was actually living in the US as a foreign student. It was a sensitive issue for him. Over the years, I see that same thing with people of Mexican and South American origin. NO, YOU’RE NOT American.
Now, if you pay attention you’d notice that United Sates is a short term we use for United States of America. I won’t go in to a long lecture about historical, geographical, and cultural issues, but the United States are the unified ‘states’ of the then Continent of America that declared independence and became a country which happened to be located in North America. And the citizens, or people of the US, are commonly accepted, all over the world – perhaps not in Mexico or South America – as, well, ‘Americans’.
(Why is it that I have NEVER heard a Canadian tell me that they are ‘Americans’? Why is that only folks from Mexico or South America insist on being labeled as ‘American’?)
Happy to help!
