Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
It's very common to hear Americans say that "being in El Paso feels like being in Mexico", as if there was no difference. But there is a difference for sure. El Paso has Mexican influence for sure - a whole lot of it - but it's still a U.S. city and has lots of cues that give away that fact.
It doesn't feel "just like" Mexico. No way
Nowhere in the continental U.S. does unless you go to some tiny isolated "colonia" hamlet on the Rio Grande right on the border.
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I wonder if it's people who have not been to Mexico and whose only frame of reference is how it (and other heavily Mexican-American areas) differs from the US mainstream. If you have really limited exposure to non-American societies, even slight differences within US cities, states and their associated cultures seem large.
People say stuff like Montreal is like France/Europe too, from a North American standpoint.
Even more of a stretch is when people say that ethnic enclaves in the US or Canada are literally like the "old country". For example, claiming that the San Gabriel Valley is like being in a Mexican or Chinese city, or that Brampton, Surrey, or Edison, NJ are like being in India. These are just run-of-the-mill North American urban or suburban areas with cars and houses like any other, but just because you see scores of plazas with foreign writing driving by, and make value judgments based on the appearance of a bunch of people with recent ancestries from elsewhere (whose children are probably going to consume Anglo-North American culture anyways) doesn't mean the place is super exotic.
The overused cliche of some place with lots of people from country X being claimed to be "just like being in the country X" can be sold in both positive ("look at how diverse and multicultural our city/suburb is, you don't have to visit X to experience X culture, just go there!) or negative ways (eg. "look, they're taking over, this place isn't like what it used to be", but either way it is exaggerated.