My blog

Before I was in a country where everybody knew everybody was Puertorrican. Suddenly, I am in a place where “Americans” don’t know our relationship with the US and what does it imply. Suddenly I am in a place where people are resentful because we Puertorrican are citizens and other immigrants are not; something that is not our fault if they see it as something that hurt them. Suddenly I am in a segmented place where Caucasians, African Amercians, Latinos and Asians live in different part of the city and that reflect the way they treat each other. Suddenly I am in the copy machine with my professional papers and an African American asks me laughing if those are the immigration papers. All of a sudden I am in a big city afraid of that somebody could speak to me and I wouldn’t understand anything. All of a sudden I am trying to work hard to use public transportation fallowing some instruction and I put the transportation card in the bus machine in the wrong side fallowed by an instruction of the bus driver in English that I don’t understand each time she says it louder. All of a sudden I do another mistake in another bus and I perceive hostility in the bus driver toward me. I didn’t see any smile around his face and, as my mom taught me, I said thank you. All of a sudden I am in the Department of State and they don’t allow a relative to go with me inside the offices resulting in communication barriers between them and me, and treating me in a very insensitive way. All of a sudden I am in a place where many immigrants see the US as the land of opportunities, that the money fall from the trees if you work hard while they still live in poverty and are discriminated.

Then some “Americans” ask me “What´s wrong with the United States?” “What is wrong with the US?!!!” I reply inside myself. Of course, after having all this shock with the culture, I need a blog to say all what I think about this beautiful country.