America is a country… and a continent, or (possibly) two

A long time ago, about 20 years to be exact, I was living in a flat full of Peruvian girls.

This was in my Madrid days.

I’d found the place by putting a classified ad in a newspaper called Segunda Mano.

For a few euros, you could text them 20 words (or something) and the next day your ad would run in the paper.

I did this, back in 2005, and received a few phone calls. The flat was in the center of Madrid, just beside Puente de Segovia, and it wasn’t terrible.

It was decorated in Spanish granny style, the rent on the room was around 250€ a month, and of the indeterminate number of Peruvian girls who lived there, at least one was pretty nice.

I say there was an indeterminate number of Peruvian girls because their cousins and friends would move in and out from time to time, and it wasn’t clear at any given moment who was living there and who was just hanging out.

Everything went well for several months. I was 22, and working at a language school in Sol. The flat was close enough that I could walk up the hill and across Plaza Mayor to get to work at 9 AM.

Europe! I was, truly, living the life.

Then one of the girls moved her aunt into our little flat.

El Gringo moves to Lavapiés

There must have been several things that annoyed me about the aunt, but the only one that’s stuck in my mind for the last twenty years is that she would always call me El Gringo.

I’d ask her to stop. “Por favor, no me llames gringo”.

But she’d say something along the lines of “Te llamo gringo porque eres gringo, y punto.”

My mental response to this was something like, “Listen, lady… in my part of the world we’ve got words for people like you, too. Would you like to hear them?”

But I didn’t have enough Spanish to produce a sentence of that length, so I held my tongue.

This went on for a couple of months. Summer came, and I was seasonally unemployed. But a guy I knew from hanging out at the cheap student bars in Lavapiés was leaving his rented room for a while.

He had said he also lived in Lavapiés, but when I went down to see the place, I found it was actually several blocks beyond Embajadores. In Delicias, in other words.

That was disappointing. I had dreamed of spending the summer living in bohemian heaven, dating a series of German university exchange students, and being able to invite them to “my place in Lavapiés”.

Oh well. Back then, Delicias didn’t have the glamor it does now.

But I decided to move in anyway.

America is a continent, not a country

Was I being too sensitive about the word gringo? Maybe.

Maybe it’s just a description, like calling someone Italian or Mexican. But I didn’t like it, or at least I didn’t like the way this woman was saying it.

Of course, this was long before the term “microagressions” was in the common parlance. In my day, we just assumed people were assholes, and that was it.

But I would soon find myself on another side of this issue in my dealings with leftist types from Spain and Latin America.

Because they would sometimes take offense at my use of the word “American”.

“America is a whole continent!” they’d say. “Not a country. If you are American, than what is someone from Colombia?”

In my innocence, I’d answer, “Why, South American, of course.”

“YANKEE IMPERIALIST! HOW DARE YOU?”

Latin people didn’t like that at all.

Wait… is America a continent? Or two continents?

As it turns out, a lot of people in the world don’t believe in South America, per se. They believe in America, and they think that dividing the continent in two at Panama is just a product of gringo racism.

In fact, there’s no consensus on how many continents exist at all.

When I was a kid, in school back in Arizona, the answer to “How many continents are there?” was clearly seven: Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, North America, South America and Antarctica.

If I’d answered anything else on a geography test, I would’ve been wrong.

But a lot of people out there believe in six, or even five continents: Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and America.

North and South America are all one continent, according to this theory, and (at least for the five-continent people) Antarctica doesn’t count.

We might have said “The Americas” in my town, when talking about North and South, as well as the islands of the Caribbean – but that was mostly in the context of European exploration centuries ago.

The seven-continent model was, I thought, unquestionably “true”.

But as I found out here in Spain, the story of the continents is more complex than my third-grade Social Studies teacher let on.

How many continents are there, anyway?

The continents don’t exist in nature… I mean, the landmasses do, but the concept of dividing landmasses into “continents” is – dare I say it – a social construct.

I know, I know.

I’m as exhausted as anyone else by hearing that various things are social constructs. But in the case of the continents, it happens to be true: who decides what’s a continent and what’s not?

The Greeks are the ones who first divided their world between Europe, Asia and Libya. Back then, they thought the Aegean Sea was the center of the world. Libya is what they called North Africa.

It was considered a bit arbitrary by some, even in those days, to divide one landmass into three separate continents, but the concept stuck, and today, Turkey is considered to be Asia, while Greece is Europe, and Egypt is Africa.

People who believe in the five-continent model will say that the Panama Canal is a human construction, not some dividing line between two separate continents. But in that case, so is the Suez Canal that divides Africa from Asia.

And who decided that the Ural Mountains are the edge of Europe, anyway?

Seems pretty arbitrary. There’s no law of physics saying that Asia begins to the east of the Urals.

But people love clinging to their archaic social constructs. In 20 years in Spain, I haven’t convinced anybody that Europe doesn’t really exist – that if anything, it’s just a peninsula on the western side of Asia.

Now, back to the word “American”.

Why do people from the US call themselves Americans?

These days, I usually tell people I’m “from the United States” – especially when I’m speaking Spanish.

But a much younger me once made a video attempting to explain why Americans use the word “American” to describe themselves.

I was in an Airbnb in Lisbon when I made this, fresh off a series of rather depressing breakups and distracting myself with the project of becoming YouTube famous.

The basic argument for why people from the US call themselves Americans – and their country “America” is as follows:

1. The word American comes from the United States of America. It’s just a shorter form.
2. In English, that’s just the standard way of speaking. In Spanish, they say “estadounidense”. And that’s great. But in English we don’t have another word, because the word is “American”.
3. Mexico is officially Estados Unidos Mexicanos. And they call themselves Mexicans. Seems like we should be able to call ourselves Americans, following their lead.

On the surface, it seems that the name United States of America is a bit different than a lot of other country names. It’s not so much a name as a description.

On the other hand, if you look at Wikipedia, most countries also have a longer official name: the People’s Republic of China. The Federal Republic of Germany. La República Bolivariana de Venezuela.

There’s even, for example, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

(Spain can be called El Reino de España, but officially it’s just España. The word Reino – AKA Kingdom – doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution of 1978, but of course, the King does.)

Anyway, nobody’s insisting that people from the Dominican Republic call themselves Dominicanrepublicans, or that people from the Oriental Republic of Uruguay call themselves – oh, I don’t know… Orientalrepublicofuruguayans.

But check out the comments on that video: people were (and still are) pissed at me for suggesting that “American” is just a normal word to use. At the very least, they call me ignorant, if not racist, for using normal English words.

Trump’s Gulf of America

All this has come up again recently because US (or American) president Donald Trump has signed an executive order entitled “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness” which changes the official name of the body of water formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico.

It is now, as you have surely heard, the Gulf of America.

I figured that a lot of the people who have been screaming “America is a continent, not a country!” at me for the last few decades would be on board with this change. But they’re not.

A poll I did on Instagram showed that most people favor the name Gulf of Mexico, even though the gulf is right in the middle of America, the continent.

Now, a lot of people will just rabidly oppose anything that Trump says on principle. But I think Gulf of America sounds a bit more inclusive, given that it also has shores in the US and in Cuba.

Who’s with me?

Gringos, guiris and yankees

Here in Spain, the word “gringo” isn’t very common. And a lot of Latin people have no problem with the word “American” – the ones who do are usually just looking for an argument.

These days, here in Barcelona, I’m much more likely to be called El Guiri.

As I explained in another article, the word guiri refers to pale-skinned people from the US, Canada, or the north of Europe. It’s usually not offensive – at least, it seems a lot friendlier than “gringo” does.

Another thing – and this one really pisses me off – is the slogan “Yankee Go Home”.

Not because I particularly care about people’s beef with the US Naval base in Andalucía, but because Spanish people sometimes use Yankee as a synonym for American.

But Yankees are people from the north. I’m from Arizona, and to quote the polite phrasing on Wikipedia, “In the Southern United States, Yankee is a derisive term which refers to all Northerners.”

Maybe things were different in your town, but when I was growing up, we had a healthy suspicion of northerners and people from “back east”. We thought they considered themselves to be our moral and cultural superiors.

(Many years later, the coastal elites are still giving off that vibe, to be honest. But whatever.)

Reality: the ultimate social construct

I find it fascinating that something as basic as the number of continents is up for debate.

One of the most interesting things about living abroad, though, is that you’ll probably find that a lot of what you considered to be “reality” is just a social construct.

That “continent” under your feet might seem real – as real as the 744 genders! – but in fact, it’s only a collective agreement between members of a culture, and other cultures might have objections to your narrow worldview.

In any case, one of the big arguments people like to make is “Who gave you the right to use the word American?”

And the answer is: nobody did, and nobody needs to. I don’t need permission from all 600 million people south of the Rio Grande in order to use a word.

And policing the vocabulary selection of complete strangers has always seemed a bit pointless to me. At best, they’ll decide you’re not capable of intelligent conversation, and walk away. At worst, you’ll create long-term resentment.

I don’t think you’re going to change anyone’s mind.

But as usual, that’s just my opinion.

Thanks for reading,

Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.

P.S. I did another Instagram poll – a lot of my followers are either Spanish or Latin – and the majority say that the word “gringo” isn’t meant to be offensive, but also that it depends on how someone says it. It can be offensive, in other words, if the person speaking wants it to be. What do you think? Leave me a comment below!

P.P.S. I’m sorry for using the word Latin throughout this article, I know it’s supposed to be Latinx. But while we’re here, the origin of the word “Latin” to refer to people from Central and South America is interesting as well. The expression Latin America was coined in the time of Napoleon III, and suggested that people over there should be more allied with France than with “Anglo-Saxon” America. Not a lot of people are talking about Napoleon III and the fact that there was a Habsburg Emperor of Mexico back in the 1860s, but I’m sure it was an interesting time.

P.P.P.S. In another article, called Why do Americans love Spain? I talked a bit about identity politics (or their lack) over here in Iberia. You might like that as well. All of which reminds me, it’s almost Women’s Day… time to smash that patriarchy, amirite?