What is America?

 

When I was a student, I lived in a small room on a floor full of other students. One of them was a Chilean, and whenever I referred to the United States as "America," he would correct me by saying, "the United States of North America."

In the halftime show of the Super Bowl LX, the Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny ended his performance by leading a group of dancers, each flying the flag of a country of the Americas. Bad Bunny shouted, "God bless America!" and then went on to enumerate all the countries of the Americas, ending with the United States and Canada. 

Some people from the U.S. who were in the audience may not have picked up what he was putting down, but the way I see it, this was a message both of defiance and of inclusivity. Put another way, the message was: we're not part of your country; your country is part of our continent. 

I think Bad Bunny expressed the same thing when he was recently quoted as saying, "English is not my first language, but that's OK... it's not America's first language either." I think he wasn't referring to the historical first language of what is now the U.S. (like Cherokee or Navajo), but of the main language of the Americas, Spanish.

The more I think about this, the more it makes sense. How is it that there's a North America, a Central America and a South America, and one of these contains a country that is called... America? How is it that "the American South" means something completely different than "South America"?

Maybe we should take Bad Bunny's example, and use "America" to refer exclusively to the left half of my picture. But there's one problem with this: what adjective do we use to refer to the right half of my picture? If it's not "American," what is it? USian? United Statesian?