Recorded from Salisbury, Maryland, 2021.
This snapshot was gathered in conjunction with the Maryland Voices initiative at Maryland Humanities, specifically to supplement the "Voices and Votes: Democracy in America" traveling exhibition from the Smithsonian's Museum on Main Street program. This collection, made up of stories of first-time voters between the ages of 18 and 24, showcases the experiences of young people as they wrestled with the 2020 presidential election, issues around social justice, the environment, immigration, and the pandemic. The full collection of stories is available at www.museumonmainstreet.org.
Arianna Gomez (00:00): So my name is Arianna Gomez. I am from originally Laurel, Maryland. I grew up in PG County my whole life, but now I study at Salisbury University. I am a K through 12 ESL certification major and that essentially boils down to just me wanting to help people learn English as a second language in [inaudible 00:00:25] academic schooling, as well as also trying to help teach people who are adult ESL learners.
Arianna Gomez (00:33): Oh, what it means to be an American. I have so many different ideas of what that means, but I think they all just boil down to where you're born. If you're born in the United States, you're an American. If you marry an American, you're an American. If you naturalize yourself, you are an American and it really comes from how you choose to identify yourself. My mother immigrated to the US when she was 17 and now that she married my father and became a residential [inaudible 00:01:11] through that, she's an American citizen just as I am, even though I was born here in the US.
Arianna Gomez (01:16): My father immigrated when he was four. So he was naturalized as a US citizen. And all of these things still add up to the same solution, you're an American. I don't think it really matters where you come from, what language you speak, what you do as a person. I feel like if you hold yourself to the same values as any other American would, I think that really decides who you are and what you are as an American. I think those values are just learning how to respect others, that having that freedom of choice, really having those liberties to make those decisions for yourself as well as for your community. A lot of people like to view Americans as too individualistic, too about themselves, and that's why maybe we're not the best at handling the current pandemic and with other global situations.
Arianna Gomez (02:14): But at the same time, we do have the value of community instilled in us as children. As you grew up and you say the Pledge of Allegiance every time you go to school, it's really about learning how to not only take care of yourself, but those around you and fighting for other people's freedoms as well. I believe that there is a pessimistic side of what it means to be an American. I do feel like as though America's put in a very extremely bad light, especially when you bring the idea of public education in mind, free healthcare. When you think about those kinds of things and how they had different ideas from when the Declaration of Independence was signed, the Constitution, how all of the power was given to the states because we wanted to be self-autonomous.
A full transcript is available on the Museum on Main Street website.
Asset ID: 2021.03.04.a
