For example, I have always felt to be sort of in between a lot of different nationalities and cultures, thus causing me to never feel entirely connected to one specific culture. I was born in Miami, I was raised in the Dominican Republic, and I have a German grandfather. Even though I was raised in the DR, I grew up with two passports, and a Dominican one wasn't one of them. So as far as the law was concerned, I was a German and an American living in the DR. At age 17, I eventually got my third passport confirming a nationality that would be the best fit for me. Ironically enough, this happened after I left the country to live in the United States for the first of what have now been six-plus years there. But it gets more complicated.
Even though I am mostly a Dominican, I grew up in a culture that was heavily influenced by the Americans. I spent most of my childhood and teenage years at a bilingual school where most of the teachers were American which made me feel like I was living in an American bubble for a large portion of my formative years. Plus there's the fact that my name, Karl Utermohlen, was given to me after my great-grandfather, a German soldier who lost a leg for his homeland during WWI, and that's hard to ignore. It's hard to overlook the fact that my background is almost exclusively European--from the long line of Utermohlens of Germany, to the Messinas in Sicily, to the Vinas in the Canary Islands, I am a person of European blood whose native tongue is a Romance language.
So in a country that prides itself on its indigenous and African roots, I have the skin of a European and the education of an American, thus causing some assumptions about who I am. Whenever I fly back home from the US, flight attendants and other airline employees assume that I am an American vacationing in the Caribbean and always talk to me in English. Although it's not as extreme back home, there are still people in the DR that see me mostly as an American. In fact, I have yet to meet an American who has figured out that I am foreign(even though I'm technically American) before someone told them so. Yet, as soon as they find out where I'm from, they see me in a different light. Not a negative one, but a different one that separates me from those who were raised in the US whether they realize it or not. Even within Americans, that's completely natural. If you take a person from New York and introduce them to someone from Alabama and then to someone else from New York, chances are that they'll have a better understanding of the other New Yorker's background than the person from Alabama.
And on still another level, race and ethnic background can also affect people's upbringings. If you take an African-American, an Italian-American, an Irish-American, and a Latino-American, there are certain cultural aspects of their background that are bound to stay with them. There's no doubt that the level of how much of their background is still a part of them depends on what generation American they are, but these differences are still noticeable because of the cultural influence at home. And this is basically what my conversation with Gia was about. I told her about how the many countries and people that make up my background have made it difficult for me to easily define my ethnic identity, and she felt the same way.
Gia said that despite her very Italian name, she's obviously more American than anything else because she grew up in the US. Nevertheless, one side of her family is Italian-American, and the other side is Irish-American--two cultures that don't exactly see eye-to-eye with everything. Because of this small difference in ethnicities, she's noticed certain clashes between the culture that makes it complicated for her to simply define herself as one or the other when people ask her what she is. Which brings me to Vargas.
Last year, a successful journalist named Jose Antonio Vargas came to Gettysburg College to talk about something similar to my blog post. He talked about his own experience growing up as a Filipino-American in California and how he first found out that he was in the US illegally at age 16. His parents sent him from the Philippines to his grandparents in California as a kid, and it wasn't until he tried to get his driver's license that he found out he didn't have the proper documents to prove that he was an American. Many years later, because of the fact that he felt like he was living a lie after winning a Pulitzer and many other accolades thanks to his journalism, he came out of the closet as an illegal immigrant.
He developed an interest in the subject of what it means to be American and started a non-profit named Define American which strives to start a conversation similar to the one I'm trying to create here about what it means to be American and how your background defines part of who you are. As I mentioned earlier, being an 'American', or a specific type of 'American', or a German-Spanish-Italian-American-Dominican, or whatever is becoming increasingly difficult, yet these things are still relevant in our lives whether we realize it or not.
Just consider the fact that even though Vargas has never been legally American, he considers himself an American because of where he grew up. And even though I can't speak German and I've never touched German soil, my German background and namesake has made me develop an affinity for certain German things. I always root for Germany in international football games, yet I sometimes call it soccer because of the American in me. I also became a fan of basketball and decided to follow the Mavericks when they acquired star German forward Dirk Nowitzki. And when it comes to baseball, the biggest sport in the Dominican Republic which was created by Americans, I always root for Dominican players and take pride in their success.
By the way, my mother once went to a man who knows a lot about faces and showed him a picture of me to try to decipher what I look like from a racial standpoint. He said I have the facial characteristics of Sephardic Jews who hailed from the Canary Islands.
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