America is not a country. The
United States is a country. The Western Hemisphere consists of
North America,
Central America and
South America.
If you ask any citizen of the Unites States who was born in the US what their nationality is, I’m sure that they would explain their heritage to you, saying their father is Italian, their mother from Syria; that they are half Irish, a quarter Japanese and an eighth Albanian, or something like that. This is because the US is a country that was initially inhabited primarily by immigrants (after it was plundered from the Native Americans, of course). I’m not going to rant about what it has become, now that the Statue of Liberty turns people away before they even get here... but it started out a place where anyone was welcome. So after speaking to a someone who is an eighth Canadian, and eighth Brazilian, a quarter Australian, and half Spanish, if you asked them what nationality they were, they would reply AMERICAN.
Whatever nationality their ancestors may have come from, being born in the US means you are AN AMERICAN. No, America is not a country, but the term AMERICAN has come to represent a nationality. The fact is simply that unitestatesian is just not a pretty word. “Estadounidense” is a great word and I’m sure it works great to refer to US citizens when speaking from a Spanish point of view, but US citizens would never refer to themselves that way.
And yes, technically, anyone from the western hemisphere is an American. But the fact is that they would never reply as such or refer to themselves that way. As Antisonic’s Spanish teacher encountered, no one wants to hear you say you are an American if you’re actually from Latin America and you are Costa Rican or Nicaraguan. Your heritage is so much more valuable than the term American, which is why people say to begin with that their mother was this and their father was that. I have never heard a Canadian call themselves Northern American, and I’ve certainly never heard someone from Peru call themselves Southern American.
And most people who have immigrated here, make sure to say that they are Italian-American, Iranian-American, Chinese-American and so on and so forth.
No, America is not a country. But if you were born there you are an American.