Before I went abroad last semester to Salvador, Brazil, I thought that the great amount of traveling I have been blessed enough to have done in my life somehow made me more "cultured" and therefore less typically American. I've always associated American-ness with ignorance, entitlement and self-absorption. Thus, I've never wanted any connection with America.

Unfortunately, my semester and summer abroad in Brazil taught me that no matter how little affinity I want with America, my American identity is not something I can ever escape.
I chose Salvador because it was an ideal location to conduct research for my thesis in anthropology. In order to conduct better research, I decided two things that I hoped would help the process along. The first was that I would learn Portuguese, and the second was that I would immerse myself so completely as to "be" Brazilian.

Though I thought learning Portuguese would be more challenging, that was actually the easy part. In the Brazilian state of Bahia, hardly anyone speaks English. Thus, if you want to get around, Portuguese is a necessity. Between classes and talking to my friends and host family everyday, I was speaking Portuguese within a month.

Becoming Brazilian was a different story. By the end of my six months in Bahia, my friends called me "Bahiana de cora?ss??o" (Bahian at heart). Yet, despite that, there was still a significant barrier between me and my goal of becoming Brazilian. No matter how fully I immersed myself, I was never able to adopt or understand the Brazilian mindset, and I was never able to "become" Brazilian. As an American, it was impossible.

What was it about my American identity that made total immersion insurmountable? I spent many hours agonizing over this question and feeling hurt that this culture I wanted so badly to be part of had essentially rejected me.

Ultimately, I came to realize that my cultural rejection was out of my control. Whether I wanted it to or not, my American-ness always represented more than just my nationality to the people that I encountered.

For all of the reasons that I had always wanted to escape from my American identity, Brazilians often viewed me with disdain. This was exacerbated by the fact that the United States has a particularly nasty history of imperialism in Latin America. Brazilians are rather resentful of the fact that their northern neighbors think they have the right to push everyone around.

If I wasn't treated with disdain, I was placed on a pedestal by those who had so internalized America's hegemony as to believe that America actually is bigger and better in every way.

Yet, whatever the reaction was, the way people related to me was almost always a reflection of how they viewed the United States, and whether negative or positive, it always rendered me as "other."

Before going to Brazil, I had aspirations of working in overseas humanitarian aid.
After this experience, I have seriously started to question the validity and ethics of these aspirations. If I couldn't connect with regular people on a social level, how would I be able to connect with and give aid to the most vulnerable populations in Brazil, or anywhere?

It's true that America does not have the same imperialist history everywhere in the world as it does in Latin America.

Yet even so, our leadership's bombastic rhetoric on the need to defend freedom and liberty, which somehow entitles us to do whatever we want in other countries, projects an image of domination and manipulation that reflects not just on our leadership, but our people.

Furthermore, I would never be OK with a foreigner coming to America and telling me that they understood the complexities of America's social problems well enough to help, so why should it be ok for me to do the same in another country? There is a lot of misery in the world, but maybe our presence as foreigners abroad trying to "help" only compounds that misery by creating unnecessary cultural conflicts and forcing the world's most vulnerable populations to submit to our need to carry the "white man's burden."

So now I have moved my aspirations inwards. Perhaps the biggest contribution I can make towards a better world is working to make my own country better.

If America is better educated, more just and less power-hungry, not only will the lives of Americans improve, but we can also lessen our negative impact on the rest of the world.

And then, perhaps, some of the cultural barriers I experienced will be broken down, and my original goal of becoming Brazilian will be a lot more attainable.
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