TODOS somos Americanos!

By the way, something you learn quickly when travelling in South America is that you come from "Los Estatos Unidos"- The United States. NOT "America". South Americans refer to the whole of our two continents as "The Americas" and understandibly get pissed when one country uses this name to identify themselves alone. To them, we are all "Americans" and describing something as "American" is a much more vague concept.

This is at least semantically correct- we have no more rights to claim "America" as our name as France does to call it self "Europe" (Or does a band to call itself "Europe" despite how hard and mightily they may rock, especially when they are actually from Sweden, which is technically Scandinavia, but i digress).

One wonders, though, what is the great worth of being named after an Italian cartographer who put his name all over his maps of the New World, leading people to believe that the New World was called America?

Could it be that the perceived prestige of the title is actually that which The United States of America earned in our early, sexy rock star period? Nevermind the dirt that we're dragging it through in our current Fat Elvis/Rome-before-the-Fall phase, at one point "America" (as in "The United States of..") was a pretty powerful word the world over. Maybe that textual clout is what South Americans are really interested in. Or maybe this is just a nationalist fantasy along the lines of the joke "The English language: Britain invented it, America made it popular".

Whatever the reason, in South America it is always best to be polite and say you're "De Los Estatos Unidos" instead of "American", which would be much easier. Despite the fact that behind your back, you're always just "Gringo".