Disrupting the Hyphen: Identity and Belonging in America

Abstract

A semester abroad in Cape Town for Corey, an African American woman, her best friend, Maria, a Mexican-American woman, and their friend Megan, a white working-class American woman, disturbed in diverse ways how they thought about the meaning of America and of being American. Young Americans leaving the United States for the first time in 2000 began their journeys convinced that it was diversity rather than similarities that united them as Americans. They believed that all they really had in common with other Americans was their citizenship. Renato Rosaldo has argued that in the United States full citizenship is inversely correlated with cultural visibility and that ethnic, racial, and sexual identities, among others, make full participation in American citizenship difficult (Rosaldo 1993). The stories of Megan’s, Maria’s, and Corey’s travels to South African suggest ways that travel changed these young Americans’ sense of belonging to America. They found being labeled as just American by a South African reverse gaze disturbing because they had not experienced American citizenship as an equalizing category.