11 Years in Mexico and Counting...

What's on my mind?  Many things:  Like the idea of writing my memoirs (Ha! Ha! Ha!):  "Eleven Years in Mexico"...  Sounds good?  Ok.  But, I've gotta first return to the U.S. in order to write them...  Return to the U.S.?  You must be kidding!  For 11 years I have always thought about that possibility.  However, each year that goes by, that possibility decreases into an increasing improbability... for now.  So, the memoirs becomes post-poned and maybe the title changes to 12 years in Mexico or 15 years in Mexico...  For a moment I pondered upon the idea of visiting Chile for a month, the month of December.  Alone.  Of all of the Latin American countries, Chile is the only one I've desired to visit if not spend more than a visit... For years, I've had that desire, years before I floated on Facebook...  And then I read recent histories of Chile that haulted that desire, like a Jew who planned on visiting Munich or Warsaw or Kiev or...  But we aren't Jews and we aren't socially minded leftists and we aren't Croatians and we aren't... We are just humans floating in a semi-contaminated sea, that contamination floating randomly on changing currents just as driftwood... and hopefully we can float in opposite directions of that contamination... sometimes we too are part of that contamination... hopefully not frequently...  Years ago a Theater professor at the University of Veracruz in Xalapa said to me, "So, you're a Gringo"... And I said, "I wouldn't call myself that..."  She quickly replied, "But, it's not a bad word, it is historical when the U.S. invaded Mexico in the 19th Century and we yelled at the Green Uniformed soldiers, 'Green Go' (although their uniforms were gray and not green and the Veracruzanos 150 years later don't speak English to know that Verde is Green and Vete is Go).  It's not offensive." And I said, "no, not offensive.  You're just telling me to leave your country everytime you call me a Gringo..."  The Mexicans are concerned that the whole world calls those from the United States, "Americans" as if I decided to claim North and South America my own or as if I was saying that I and the rest of the people born in the U.S. were the only real people living in the Americas...  Now, outside of the U.S. the "intellectuals" with their noses bent out of shape have a valid argument that everyone from the Arctic tundra of Canada to Cape Horn of South America are Americans.  It is so valid that when I write fellow citizens from the United States and use the name they were born hearing, be it from fellow citizens of the United States of more probably from everyone else in the world living outside the U.S., "Americans", I write it in quotations...  Here, the pseudo intellectuals (I call them pseudo because if they had the basic level of intelligence, they would know better than to say certain things such as...) who know better than to call anyone "Gringo", since it's like calling a Mexican "Spic" in the U.S. call people from the U.S. "North Americans".  And no matter how much you explain to them that Canadians are North Americans just as Mexicans are North Americans, they insist on reconstructing continents so they can distinguish the difference between a "Gringo" and a Mexican, believing that everyone born in the U.S. has Anglo-Saxon blood and worships in a Protestant church without images of Jesus bloody on a cross or Saints in all their forms of torture.  Granted, they don't call those Churches Protestant, but Christian, as if saying that the Christians worship a different God than the Catholics, although Catholicism is a Christian religion...  Anyway, I tell "them" almost every day that NorteAmericano (North American) is incorrect.  And they ask me, "Then what should we call you...?"  And, I tell them, "Only in Spanish, since the name doesn't work in English, but the issue isn't there but here, where we speak only Spanish...  To remove US from the "bronca" (conflict), call us or them, EstadoUnidienses... People from the United States..."  Simple... you would think.  Easy compromise for releasing ourselves from the tonteria (foolishness)...  you would think.  But somehow they are ready for THAT, surprisingly and they say, "But, we're EstadoUnidienses also.  This is "The United States of Mexico!"  And, if you look up the history of the legal names of Mexico, you will find that Mexico is not only the Republic of Mexico and Mexico, it is legally The United States of Mexico...  It's on their printed money...  But, I ask, "When someone asks you what you are (meaning what is your nationality, do you say, 'I'm EstadoUnidiense Mexicano'?  When you talk about your country or when others address your country, what is the name used?"  And the answer is, "I'm Mexican, I live in Mexico, They're from Mexico, Cancun and Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta and Tijuana are places in the country of MEXICO... No one says, "The United States of Mexico"...  But, this logical intellectual discussion does not and NEVER results in compromise that one could consider politically correct.  The issue isn't about justice or what is correct.  It is about someone who feels unjustly inferior playing dirty in the attempt towards removing the sense of their inferiority placing the blame on someone who is not to blame...  They strip the U.S. Citizen of their name or their right to call them what they have always been called or decide upon a logical and geografically--historically and politically correct name that "harms" no one, as a group of young thugs would strip a man of his cloths and send him running down the streets naked...  11 years in Mexico... and this is only the tip of the iceburg...