Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.
I come from a country and also a continent whose identity is in the making. We're a very young culture, and I think that things are not yet crystallised.
American? Indian? I don't know what these words mean. In Italy, it is all about blood, family, where you come from. I'm asked where I am from. I'm from nowhere; I always was, but now I am happy knowing it.
I think we all want to know where we came from and how we fit into the world, but some of us need to know how it all works in great detail.
Where you come from is such a huge part of who you are today.
America is made up of people who came from someplace else. Even the Native Americans came over the Bering strait... America is what it is because people came from someplace else.
We're social beings, and I need to know and remember where I came from.
When our forbears - yours and mine - came to America, they came because this country promised them something. It promised them an opportunity, nourished by education, not merely to grind for a bare living, but to strive for a good life.
Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself.
Getting to know where we come from is a really profound way of getting to look at who we are.