Jeff,
Yes it does. All of us on the continent are Americans, not just those who
are citizens of the United States. After all, when you designate some as
"Africans", you do not designate the country or region they came from, do
you? Therefore, African, American, European, and Asian are continental
designations, not national designations. The fact that United States
citizens choose to call themselves Americans blurs the meaning, but does not
alter the reality.
So, yes, those Mexican immigrants who got here as best they can were and are
Americans!
Anne
Anne Pemberton
[log in to unmask]
http://www.erols.com/apembert
http://www.educationalsynthesis.org
----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 1:56 PM
Subject: Re: Not Americans?
> So does that make illegal aliens from Mexico Americans?
>
>
> In a message dated 3/13/2009 2:55:35 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
> Forgive me, but I changed the subject line, and forgive me, but this
> simply must be addressed candidly. Mr. Dixon, echoing an earlier
> contributor, wrote:
>
>> I have also wondered why historians writing about slaves
>> or free Negroes in the early American period now refer
>> to them as "African-Americans." They were not "Americans,"
>> at least in a legal or constitutional sense.
>
> Not Americans? People who helped build America, and who contributed the
> spirituals and much else to America's culture, and who endured America's
> worst injustices for most of a quarter of a millennium, and who
> naturally stood up in countless cases for America's first principles
> during the Civil War, and who handed down American descendants
> possessing the wisdom to bend history's arc toward justice in gentle,
> constructive ways -- can you actually and truly believe, Mr. Dixon, that
> in any merely decent sense whatsoever those people were not Americans?
>
> Of course the law and the Constitution deemed them noncitizens and
> worse. So what? What claim does any of that perversion and grotesqueness
> have on the actual truth, then or now, under the Laws of Nature and of
> Nature's God? Were squalidness and obscenity somehow justified merely by
> being temporarily codified?
>
> As a merely legal matter, those Americans' "owners" were "rightful"
> owners. But in discussing history we're talking about more than mere
> legality. If we weren't, some would also find ways to lend
> unjustifiable, preposterous legitimacy to the notion that some women
> were witches, or to the practice of human sacrifice. As a matter of
> legitimacy -- a permanent criterion, as opposed to the impermanent
> despicable legality of former times -- no "owner" of another human was
> ever rightful, in Virginia or anywhere else. And Mr. Dixon, if you seek
> to refute that, please also refute all that Mr. Jefferson declared about
> it.
>
> In my view we have here a distillation of the interpretation precisely
> opposite to the one that I've brought up and inquired about from time to
> time in this forum. I think that this is all fundamentally linked to
> Virginia's -- and Virginia's historians' -- hesitant unreadiness to look
> at what Fort Monroe actually means in the history not only of the
> commonwealth and the country, but of liberty itself.
>
> If we really understood who all of the Americans were in those past days
> -- that is, if we didn't, just a little bit in most cases, still think
> of some past Americans as somehow partly subhuman because the revered
> unenslaved enslaved them -- then we'd see that it is not General Butler
> and his revered "decision" that confer on Fort Monroe its special place
> in human history, but is instead the intuitively taken, brave initiative
> of Frank Baker, James Townsend and Sheppard Mallory, and of the tens of
> thousands of Americans who followed them out of slavery, all across the
> South.
>
> It seems to me that it all boils down to whether or not we completely --
> not just partially -- reject the language and therefore also the logic,
> such as it was, of the slavery era. In my view, we're still saddled by
> that, and this discussion shows it.
>
> Thanks for the chance to comment.
>
> I remain,
> An American proud of _all_ ethnicities of our fellow Americans going all
> the way back, regardless of the conditions to which some of them were
> subjected, and regardless of evanescent and deplorable legal
> classifications,
> Steven T. Corneliussen
> Poquoson, Virginia
>
>
>>
>
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