What are you?

People seem to ask this question all the time. Typically, what they mean to say is, "What is your ethnic background?"

I became accustomed to this question at a young age and would thoughtlessly spout out the answer, "I'm half Italian, a quarter Czech, and the other quarter is a mix of British, Irish, Polish, and Dutch. I think. It's complicated." I never gave much thought to my answer, and I never ran into any issues with it either. That is, I didn't have any issues until the first time I travelled to Europe without my parents.

Over April Break during my Junior year of High School, I had the opportunity to travel abroad with my High School's music department. We spent one day in Amsterdam, two days in Brussels, and five days in Achim; add in two travel days, and you get a 10-day-long European Tour. The first three nights we spent in hotels (Let me say, not the nicest I've ever stayed in. I'm pretty sure the cheap motel my mom, my sister, and I stayed at in Cherry Hill, NJ while I was looking at colleges was cleaner than the hotel we stayed at in Brussels.), but we stayed with host families while we were in Germany.

Here's where I first encountered a problem with my stock answer. My host family spoke very broken English, and I spoke absolutely no German, but we got by rather well despite the language barrier. On my first or second night there, my host father said something to the effect of, "Marinello. Are you Italian?" My first reaction was, of course, to answer with a proud "Yes." But then I noticed that I was correcting myself. I was born in the United States. So were my parents. So were my grandparents, on both sides of the family. My closest immigrant relative was my mother's father's father, who emigrated from the Czech Republic. I'm a fourth-generation Italian-American at best, and that's only half of my ethnic and cultural background (although, my "Italian" side of the family has arguably the most cultural influence in my life).

It happened again this past semester in college when I was studying abroad in Dublin. Luckily, this time I skipped over the faux-pas of declaring myself as an Italian. The four months I spent abroad was the first time in my life that I had ever really felt American. Sure, I had discussions with some of my closer Irish friends about our ethnic backgrounds, but there was a very clear distinction between our nationalities and heritages.

So why, as Americans, do we tend to overlook our nationality and only focus on heritage? It could be that the U.S. is a nation primarily comprised of immigrants, and it's assumed that heritage is a more important influence in our individual lives. Or it could be that many of us never have the opportunity to spend an extended period of time in another country, and so we never truly understand what it's like to feel American.

Here's another question - at what point does an immigrant stop being Mexican or Russian or Ukrainian and start being American? Is it when they become a naturalized citizen? Is it when English becomes the primary language spoken in their home? Is it after a certain number of generations of children born in the U.S.? Or is it up to the individual, and is whenever he or she feels American? I certainly don't know the answer. What I do know is that, legally, I have been American for 21 years. However, if we're going off when I first felt American, I've only been able to identify with this country for six months.

And why does this seem to be such an American phenomenon? Possibly because we are a nation of immigrants (plus those of indigenous American descent, who somehow always seem to get left out). But there is increasingly more emigration and immigration between European countries, and Europeans still identify with the country in which they were born. Yes, Europeans are beginning to identify more as Europeans now, but that is still the opposite of what's going on here. For example, if we had the same mentality as Europeans, a person currently living in Pennsylvania who was born in Connecticut might identify first as an American and second as a Connecticut native who currently resides in Pennsylvania.

This makes no sense. What is it about making the permanent (or semi-permanent, as the case may be) journey across the Atlantic that causes so much disjoint in how we identify with other groups of human beings? I'm still trying to work this one out, and I'm more than open to any input on the matter.