Chasing America and Identity: My Road Trip to Nebraska and South Dakota (Part 3)
Enriched and estranged
This is part 3 of a six-part series. Read part 1 and part 2.
As I replayed my conversations with Chadron locals while en route to my next stop, Mount Rushmore in South Dakota — 39th state on my list — the numerical goal of my trip moved to the back seat as an abundance of words started filling my head.
I hung in a space where my identity felt both enriched and estranged by the hands of the same people. I wrote in my journal, making the interesting choice of Italian as the language (reported here in my own translation): “There is some strangeness in my relating with these people. I am Italian. I am privileged. Educated. I had a job that these people can dream of. All of this feels strange. I have a desire to speak to them, relate, but at the same time what I am is completely different from them, and I’m not sure if it can be understood — meaning that I don’t want to give off the idea that I think I am superior. We’re not on the same level. And my being Italian makes me even more different.” In hindsight, I fret about these words — do they sound like I do believe myself superior? What makes me think that these people “can dream of my job,” if not the perception of my (lost) job as somehow better, which is questionable at best?
It occurred to me that I had strived to present myself as closer to the locals. With both Mardi, the Westerner Motel owner, and Mike, the Favorite Bar patron, I shared that I had just lost my job “by the whims of the millionaires.” Disclosing my joblessness seemed like a way to belittle my privilege and increase my relatability. And when the gun shop employee at the Ace Hardware across the street from the Westerner — yes, I had to pay a visit to the gun shop — asked me if I own guns, I replied that I don’t, “but my dad has a hunting rifle.” I’m staunchly against a culture of worshiping firearms, and so is my father, who hunted enthusiastically in the 1970s but hasn’t touched his own father’s hunting rifle in decades. But telling of weapons in my birth household, however concealed under decades of dust, felt like compensating for the unsympathetic eye with which I scrutinized the handguns behind the glass — thinking about how many times they were sold to Americans with fatal intentions; wondering why the many human lives lost to them have not been deemed worth infringing a right to bear arms bordering on obsession; pondering if my own life would add to the losses one day, simply by virtue of living in America.
What really stunned me, though, is that whenever I shared that I come from Italy, the rural Americans I interacted with had the opposite reaction from most coastal Americans: none. No reaction whatsoever. It was a sudden reversal of course, after many years in which I had been conditioned to expect (and often dread) more questions about my background.
There was no reaction from Ella, my neighbor at The Ridge’s bar counter. Ella and her husband, who sat beside her wearing a large cowboy hat, own a ranch in South Dakota, just past the border with Nebraska. I told Ella why I was there eating alone, where I drove from in the United States, and where I flew from originally several years ago. At the mention of Italy, Ella nodded with a tight smile. I awkwardly asked if she had ever been outside of the United States. She had not, she said with a tighter smile veering on the apologetic. What’s the right follow-up to that? None. We returned to our respective drinks shortly thereafter. There was also no reaction from Mardi. And no reaction from Mike and his friend whose 30th birthday they were celebrating. (Mike’s friend had recently returned to hometown Chadron after living in Denver for a few years. She was temporarily staying with her parents, and felt like excusing herself for that.)
In all likelihood, my new friends didn’t make anything of my foreignness because they didn’t know how. In middle America, not being American doesn’t add up very much. The data shows it’s just not a realistic option. According to Migration Policy Institute tabulations of the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2021 American Community Survey (ACS), Nebraska and South Dakota are among the bottom 15 states by foreign-born population. South Dakota especially stands out with only just over 30,000 foreign-born residents, amounting to 3.5% of the population — the fifth-lowest in the country. As for Nebraska, foreign-born residents are just over 140,000, which is 7.4% of the population. Just under half of foreign-born residents of both states are naturalized U.S. citizens. (The United States as a whole has a foreign-born population of 45 million — 13.6% of the total population; more than half of them are naturalized U.S. citizens.)
The vast majority of foreign-born folks in Nebraska and South Dakota emigrated from Asia or Latin America, following predictable national trends. What about Italians in the two states? According to ACS data, there are 421 Italy-born people in Nebraska. In South Dakota, I would be the 11th Italian. Less than a dozen of us in a state that’s more than half the size of our country! These facts and figures crystalize into data an elusive feeling I’ve known for a while, since I first came around to it during a visit to South Carolina: The feeling that my foreign identity isn’t contemplated by most people in many U.S. states. Who I am, what I represent, what I offer to the world, none of that has a natural place here. It’s against the natural order of things. “Where is Italy in the United States?” joked a patron at a bar in Custer, South Dakota, on my second night. Because my foreign identity is the bedrock of my American life — the one certainty I return to for shelter when the unfamiliar becomes scary and difficult and uncomfortable — if disclosing it means standing out like a sore thumb, then I’d rather keep it private, and trade the discomfort of feeling out of place for protection from vulnerability. (Of course, keeping my foreign identity private is a privilege I enjoy thanks to the color of my skin, which ensures that I’m not registered as an outlier until I start speaking with an accent.)
During this road trip, however, I reckoned for the first time that there could be a bright side to feeling estranged in middle America. When I say that I’m from Italy to coastal Americans, my identity is usually seen aplenty: I’m met with enthusiasm and awe and eagerness to share one’s own knowledge about or travel to Italy and its delicious cuisine and astounding landscapes (if I can say so myself). I didn’t realize until I left it that my country of origin is pretty darn popular in the rest of the world. In the best of times, entertaining that notion feels flattering — in the process of separating from my Italian roots, I’ve grown closer to and prouder of them (the painful irony of expatriation). In less good times, the topic of Italy can be exhausting — I don’t always have the energy to tell the story of how I moved to the United States (not least because of the open wound it fiddles with), hear about people’s remote Italian ancestry, or indulge the perennial pizza and pasta stereotypes and quasi-invariable mentions of trips to the trifecta (“Ohhh, Italy? I’ve been to romeflorenceandvenice”). In the worst of times, it’s downright upsetting — I’m somehow supposed to laugh when people talk to me in my accent using hand gestures. Ha, ha.
But in middle America, where my identity is not contemplated, I could finally say I am from Italy in peace. It’s a small gratification for the steep price of invisibility. Yet it filled me with a momentary sense of liberation, amid a state of alienation.
What I had heard, observed, and felt in Chadron had represented a turning point in my journey of discovering America. “Today I feel all deep and shit,” I joked in my Instagram stories in a self-conscious effort to defuse the seriousness and vulnerability of my writing.
I had set clear boundaries for my Instagram storytelling. I was eager to share what I was witnessing during my trip, and saw social media as the easiest way to do it. You can critique its volatility and, if you will, shallowness all you want, but it can be a legitimate, serious, and powerful storytelling tool. Even so, I was hesitant. It seems to me that members of the millennial generation often perceive a track record of not posting on social media as some sort of badge of honor to wear. It makes sense: Life is less dangerous on the invisible side, where you can see others, but they can’t see you. I worried that my public candor would make me an easy target. But more urgently for me at that moment, I feared exposing myself to many replies, reactions, and reasons for distraction in my inbox. I have a thorny relationship with digital communication. On the one hand, owing to multiple relocations between two countries and several cities within, it is a lifeline to feel close to friends and family. On the other, I often engage with it in unhealthy manners, experiencing untenable compulsions to reply to messages shortly after they buzz in. (To simplify in so few words the profound psychological process at play here, being uber-diligent at communication with friends is a means to stave off fears of being rejected or unloved by them.)
At this point in my inner work to create loving boundaries and establish a more sustainable relationship with communication, I cannot trust myself not to resist clicking on inbound messages until, say, I’m back from traveling. In the case with this road trip, I would also have identified in replies to my Instagram storytelling a form of validation (or lack thereof), with the risk of becoming hooked to it. I thus decided to turn off replies in the app settings, and communicated that in my first story: “Keep these Italian eyes company if you will, but to ensure a state of introspection and present moment awareness, replies to these stories are intentionally turned off!” (My therapist later commended the assertive boundary-work as a sign of personal growth. One may object that it shows greater confidence and less self-consciousness to turn off replies without announcing it, and I may even agree. But it’s not the right strategy for me right now, as I’m working on undoing well over three decades of not explicitly stating my needs.)
I couldn’t have set a stronger, more authentic, more beneficial boundary for myself. Not only did it facilitate present-moment awareness, and being fully there for the journey; but it also allowed me to engage intimately with that original calling of mine to write about America, its society, its politics. What occurred as a result was nothing short of a little miracle in my life. I overcame historical insecurities to set difficult boundaries, and presented myself to the world for who I really am, by means of my unvarnished writing. Crucially, in absence of external feedback, I could only find the validation I needed within myself. It was a powerful exercise in flexing the muscles of being me, unapologetically, without the guilt, the shame, the insecurities that have so often clipped my wings and prevented them from spreading.
Don’t get me wrong. Being so publicly vulnerable came with a lot of discomfort, which lingered throughout the trip and in the days that followed. But you’d be wrong to think that overcoming discomfort is a precondition to spreading your wings. It’s actually an integral part of it. It’s only if you’re willing to stay with that discomfort that you’ll take the leap of life necessary to be yourself. You’ll then discover how liberating it feels to manifest your own self, wings spread to their full extent. It’s that liberation that eventually rids you of discomfort, and puts you in a place where you’ll want to do it again, and again, and again, and whence if you choose to remain in the process, there is no going back.
Continue to part 4: Four men on the rocks, please
