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The News - Novedades Editores - Mexico City
30 de enero de 1994
©1994: Suzanne Cane y Olvera

THE LOST AMERICAN

Over the years, many American authors have dealt with the experience of the immigrant and his children in the United States. Very often, that experience has been terribly difficult and even traumatic. Integrating oneself, or his or her children, into a whole new society is not easy. Yet, there is one immigrant group that has been forgotten: Americans who live as immigrants in other countries. True, we have the American expatriate writers in Paris in the 1920's, the Hemingway's, the Fitzgerald's, the Stein's; but we have to ask whether they ever constituted true expatriates. To what extend did they give up their own national identity and fight their way into other societies? Did they ever question their Americanness? No, they did not.

Even the American "third culture" - Americans who work with the embassies and transnational companies - are not true expatriates. Yes, they live outside the United States, but they face little culture shock. They never lose their sense of identity. They never question the nationality on their passports: They are American! They work in American offices. They live in American communities. Their children go to American schools. They shop in American-dominated supermarkets or American Embassy commissaries. And, at church on Sunday, there are only Americans in the congregation, and services are conducted in English. Their families are American. Their friends are American. Their children's teachers and the pastors of their churches are American. Their Americanness remains firmly intact.

However, there is another group of Americans abroad that has received little or no attention, people who have left permanently - or think they have - people who no longer have a home in the United States. There are many. With time and as life goes by, they discover that they can never integrate completely into that other society, but they also come to realize that they can never go back to a normal, unquestioning life in the United States either. When the American is transplanted to a culture such as that of Mexico - so near, yet so far - to political, economic and social systems that are so different from those of the United States, the experience can be shattering. Some re-escape to the country of their birth and succeed, but many come to realize that they cannot readapt to life in the United States after all. They find that Thomas Wolfe was right when he said you can't go home again. They discover that they no longer fit, and certainly not with names such as Señora Suzie Smith de Gonzalez or Jane Jones de Lopez. These people have no spiritual home, and, for Americans back "home", they do not even exist. Only their relatives in the United States really know about them, and even those relatives suffer from a tendency to think that they are still on nothing more than a very extended vacation.

These are the true expatriates. These are the people who have adopted their own national anthem:
No soy de aquí, ni soy de allá.
No tengo edad, ni porvenir.

I am not from here, nor from there.
I have no age, nor any future.
                           (Facundo Cabral)

The song ends: "But to be happy is the color of my identity." Yet, one has to wonder if this can ever be true.