An 'American' Girl

This September I boarded a plane that sped me across the Atlantic, far from the shores of the U.S.A., and I didn't look back once. I landed on Spanish soil prepared to be enchanted by absolutely everything, and enchanted I was. There were orange trees lining the streets and bottles of red wine at every meal. The country closed down from two to five daily as everyone went home for a leisurely midday meal. The nightlife didn't get underway until midnight, and the streets were choked with party-goers until the wee hours of the morning.

Needless to say, few settings could have been more different from my Harvard existence. The Puritan work ethic, half-hour lunch and drinking age seemed designed specifically to make me miserable. But despite my readiness to apply for Spanish citizenship, there was something I missed. Not apple pie or cheap gas, but the multi-colored, multi-ethnic world I call home.

The United States is not an integrated oasis on the world map. But between growing up in Los Angeles and being at Harvard, my universe has been populated by people of a variety of shades and colors, from a wide range of religions and upbringings. The Spanish are much more homogenous. The vast majority can trace their ancestry back many centuries on the Iberian peninsula. Catholicism is integral to their culture and has been for ages. There are regional variations in cuisine, language and traditions but it is not the type of diversity that surrounds us here.

In the streets, malls and public high schools of Los Angeles, as well as in Harvard Yard, there are more cultures than I can fathom. There are even more names, a medley against which Spain, or any other country with such a single dominant culture, can't compete. After meeting my umpteenth Javier, I realized that names alone can be an indicator of the variety of a place. It's not that there aren't common names in this country; my name alone claims an unruly percentage of each entering class at Harvard. But names come from a family's history, religion and culture, and the Spanish are all choosing from the same pot. Here, high school rosters present a daunting challenge to wide-eyed substitutes preparing to call the role. Names are a sign of the melting pot, salad bowl or what-have-you of the U.S.

It would be incredibly naive to claim that America is the ideal, that we are a United Nations graphic design of different colored children dancing hand-in-hand. Nobody needs to be told that many of our problems as a nation stem from our differences, or that deep-seated racism dominates many political issues. Nevertheless, I have grown up taking diversity for granted. But such a diversity is virtually unique to the U.S. Being accustomed to it incalculably changes the way one views the world.

Chatting in a hostel with the usual assortment of international backpackers, Pablo from Mexico began, for some unknown reason, cataloging which nationalities of women he found attractive. He concluded his rather long list by saying, "And of course I like American girls," perhaps as a concession to the Americanas in his company. Charlie from Texas replied, "Well, then you like all kinds of girls." Pablo looked puzzled, not quite understanding Charlie's implication that there is no one "American" girl. Of course we've heard such rhetoric before, but realizing how incomprehensible it is to some people makes it more than rhetoric. Looking around the hostel at the American women--me, a mainly Eastern European jumble; a girl from Baltimore, whose mother was Japanese and whose father was white; the girls who had just arrived from Wisconsin, one black, one white; a girl from Texas whose family was Mexican--one had to conclude, at the risk of sounding obviously idealistic, that there is no appearance that constitutes an "American" girl. Which would it be? For our generation, these women are Americans, plain and simple.

Perhaps we work too hard and too much, drink too fast, and sometimes our coffee tastes terrible, but we have something worth having that few other nations have. We can be proud that a group of backpackers of different ethnicities traveling together can all be called Americans, and that our cities and schools boast countless cultures. I'm not sure if I would trade that for anything, accompanying conflicts and all--even for lots of red wine. I only hope we can preserve our diversity in something more than our names.

Sarah B. Jacoby '99, a Crimson editor, is a history and science concentrator and a resident of Mather House.