What is the American Dream? 
	For the majority of my life, I didn’t understand this concept. I didn’t understand it because I couldn’t get past the white picket fence, a family of four with a dog, and an Audi. All through grade school and then high school, this was a hot topic that hardly ever seemed controversial. Then I left to South America. I studied in Chile and met many people who would relieve all of their prejudices against the United States of America upon me. This was my first encounter with anti-American sentiments in the exterior. For about five out of the six months I spent in Chile, I still felt I could not adequately defend the country that I loved so much because I didn’t have all of the knowledge to counter the arguments of my foreign friends. My friend told me a story of when, as she was studying abroad in Mexico, one of her close friends accused the USA of not having a culture. She said, I’m sorry but what do you know of culture?? Your country has no culture. My friend laughed at her and said, you can’t offend me because, although it may be hard to see, we have culture. My reaction against my peers in classes and in social events was the contrary. I couldn’t retort and so I kept to myself. When professors would ask me questions because I was the estadounidense, I usually couldn’t offer them a well rounded response. Many times, it got to the point in which I became overwhelmed and would cry to myself when I was home alone. I knew that crying in such an unproductive way wasn’t the answer either and one day I stopped feeling this way. One day, I realized that though these students are incredibly intelligent, I am thankful for being in the same class as they. I am thankful that they are so incredibly intelligent because it exalts the level of my education and gives me something I would otherwise never have been offered. It got to the point in which I finally realized, I have to educate myself. I am behind, but I know it and I can move forward. I have to run to catch up, and they’re already jogging, but I can keep steady and keep running towards them. I realized also, I have an advantage over them, I am from the United States of America, the country that is allowing me to follow my dreams, part of which includes studying in the exterior, in South America, in the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. The most prestigious school in Chile. I may be behind in my studies, but I have all the resources to get me to where I want to be, which is beyond wherever they may be and to a level in which I will be a prosperous, productive, intelligent, well rounded individual continuing my life’s work doing work that I find pleasurable and useful for life. 
	That month, when I realized I was no longer a helpless, confounded child overwhelmed by her surroundings, I realized I was a baby adult. I am a person making decisions that will affect the rest of my life and thus far, the decisions that I have made, the life path’s that I have decided to take have been decisions and paths that have positively affected my life in many different ways. I have been blessed to have learned from worldly acclaimed professors, the entrepreneurs of their selective fields. I have been blessed to follow a university career that reflects exactly my interests in humanity and in life. I have been allowed the time necessary to mature into who I am and I have time yet to continue that development into my adult life. 
	South America was a discovery phase for me. A discovery of all that I lacked and all that became available to me as soon as I saw the potential for growth and prosperity in different parts of life. Everything thereafter has been a kind of adjustment to that new reality, to those new discoveries. I never really read the quotes in my passport until I was alone one day in an Argentine airport waiting for a flight that would take me to Brazil. There are so many inspiring quotes in my little travel book/identification document. Reading those quotes was the most patriotic I had felt since watching my older sister march in her graduation ceremony from BCT in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. How sweet it felt to be an America. To think of all the prejudices against the United States, some grudges held with great validity, yet I am always going to be thankful to the country that has allowed me to live the life that most people wouldn’t even think to dream of. Growing up has allowed me to understand my life and the lives around me with a profundity available to me only because I am reeducating myself within my environment. I have also been blessed with a very spiritually gifted mother, the one person who I have been fortunate enough to be able to divulge all of my inner troubles to and also my understandings. She listens to me as I try to get to the very core of what I am trying to say and am saying. Returning home from South America was wonderful. I loved being abroad and I made homes in all of the countries I visited, but going back home was probably just as wonderful. The type of wonderful that it will be to go back to the homes with my loved ones, created in South America. I returned home more conscious of many truths in my life and I returned home very much afraid of leaving home. In this context, leaving home, refers to spending the time it will take me to further mature away from my loved ones. I spent little over two weeks with them, then had to pack up and continue my adventure, this time in Spain. The time I spent in Los Angeles was very well spent. I had my parents, my sisters, my friends, my pets, my school, my teachers, so much of what makes me happiest surrounding me for those summer, August days in Southern California. 
	One day, in the car with my mom driving through Eagle Rock, heading towards Pasadena, I was almost in tears while speaking with my mom because I was just then, in that very moment, understanding something that had eluded me for so much of my life. I was beginning to understand the quotes in my passport, the heart of America, the American Dream. What is the American Dream??? What is it? Who can say for certain what the American Dream is? I knew it, I knew exactly what it is because I was living it. Understanding my life is what has allowed me to understand this concept. The American Dream is our own individual dream. That dream that each one has and mine had been to travel the world. Well I am traveling it. The reason so many people are attracted to America, the reason immigrants would rather take their chances with deportation to come to the United States of America is to realize their own personal dream. You see, the American Dream is that spirit of adventure that began with adventurers like Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and Sacagawea who traveled the western part of the continent in search of plant life, geographical information, and water routes without the inherent knowledge that they would make it back home, yet with an inherent spirit of I can. People who set the precedents in the American culture by allowing themselves the opportunity to do what no one else had done before them. To allow themselves to take a risk and see how far it takes them. Another great American hero, George Washington, our leader in the height of the Revolutionary War against Great Britain to a people who were going to be self-governing and free citizens and our first president. Then, others who came before me realizing their own American Dreams that have allowed me to be the person I am today, doing what life has given me the opportunity to be able to do. My Salvadorian grandfather, Colonel Guevara Pais, and my mother, Roselia Isabel Maynetto. They are people who set out along their life’s path with a spirit of I can, and they accomplished much more than they could have ever dreamed of. The sense of adventure, the assumptions of risks, the spirit of the entrepreneur, the notion of I can, all of this makes up the core of America’s heart, the dreams of the individual which as time has passed has become very widely known as the American Dream. Amen to that!

The American Dream

@Gmaynetto
Thank you for listening. I appreciate it. I wish I knew who you all were, but seeing the numbers go up is personable enough for the interweb! Cheers everyone! Much love! <3

GMLOVE