Constantino Diaz-Duran is a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. He is chronicling his walk from New York to Los Angeles to celebrate his eligibility for American citizenship. Follow Constantino’s progress.

I can’t roll my R’s. I’m a native Spanish speaker who can’t roll his R’s. Never been able to do it. That, combined with the fact that my life is now lived almost entirely in English, means my Spanish no longer sounds native. A few weeks ago a Texan told me that his Spanish is better than mine. At first I said to myself, “This schmuck has some gall.” But then I thought about it, and you know what? Maybe he’s right. Maybe my Spanish is now Spanglish. And if it is, I’ll own it.

Last year, when I was in Philly, I was interviewed by a reporter with the local Spanish-language newspaper. Writing about my move to the U.S. 11 years ago, the reporter wrote:

The break with Guatemala was almost complete, and irreparable. That is what you can deduce from Constantino’s Spanish. His Castilian R sounds Americanized, completely shelved, as if he refused to relive a language in which he wasn’t understood.

I laughed when I read that. Then I emailed the reporter to let him know that my relationship with the Spanish language is not as fraught with drama as he seemed to think. I’d be lying, however, if I said it hasn’t made me think about my use of language, and especially, what language I’ll speak with my children when they’re born. I want them to be bilingual at least, and will encourage them to learn more languages. But will we speak Spanish at home? I honestly don’t think so.

I’ll probably be judged by many who will accuse me of losing my roots, or who will think I’m a bad parent for not passing the language on to my kids. I used to shake my head at immigrant parents who didn’t use their native language when talking to their American-born children. “They’re denying them a great opportunity,” I used to think. But what I’ve come to realize is that the most important purpose of language is communication. And when it comes to family, efficient communication is paramount.

The reason why most second-generation Americans speak English with their parents is because they find it easier. A lot of my fellow first-generation immigrants feel guilty about this, and think they should be stricter about forcing their children to speak the old country’s language, but really, they shouldn’t. At home you must speak in whatever language facilitates open and deep conversation. If that language happens to be English, then so be it, and if it ends up being a hybrid, no hay problema.

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Languages evolve. That is the beauty of them. They must adapt to culture, and time. They must serve the people who speak them, not the other way around. As a writer, I see language as my tool, not my master. And that is how everyone should approach it. Who cares what you sound like, as long as you’re able to respectfully and happily communicate with your fellow humans?

So I have a funny accent in English, and now I have a funny accent in Spanish. I sound like a native speaker in a grand total of zero languages. That’s fine. I sound like me in all of them. And when I become a father, I will do my best to encourage my children to just find themselves, be themselves, and sound like themselves.

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*Photo by Constantino Diaz-Duran.

Constantino Diaz-Duran is a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. He is chronicling his walk from New York to Los Angeles to celebrate his eligibility for American citizenship. Follow Constantino’s progress.

Christine’s humble cabin bakes in the Texas sun, 12 miles west of the town of Brenham. At 62, she scrapes by with an income of less than $1,000 a month, and her home is testament to her poverty. Her generosity, however, is great. She took me in for a couple of nights, shared her homemade wine with me, and we even cooked meals with mushrooms and vegetables that grow on her land.

A former citizen of Austria, Christine came to the U.S. in the 1970s to study English. Her parents wanted to send her to England, but she chose America because she wanted to date—something her strict Catholic father forbade. She worried that England was too close to home and that her parents would visit her frequently if she lived there. She landed in Kentucky and a few months later, she fell in love. She married an American man, finished her bachelor’s degree in the Bluegrass State, and moved to Tennessee to get her doctorate at Vanderbilt University.

Christine’s husband died of cancer when she was in her late 20s, and she never remarried. She instead dedicated her life to academia and to raising two daughters. She became an American citizen in 1980 and spent several years teaching German in Spain and South Africa. She returned to the U.S. when her daughters were in middle school and took a job as a professor in Illinois.

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Christine dedicated most of her academic career to studying the German language and culture of the Texas Hill Country. Eventually, she fell in love with the area and bought the farm where she now lives. When her daughters graduated from high school, she decided to move here permanently and work at Texas State University in San Marcos.

So how does an accomplished scholar come to live in such poverty? Illness. Christine was diagnosed with a terminal autoimmune disease in the mid-2000s, and was forced to stop teaching. She lost her house in San Marcos, and her medical bills ate up her savings. The farm is all she has left. Her income comes from a job she got through an organization called Experience Works. Last year she got sick for several weeks, and could not go to work. She was then forced to rely on her neighbors’ charity even for food.

I wish I could have met Christine’s friends and neighbors. These people have kept this woman afloat. They lend her money when she can’t work, buy her food when she can’t afford it, and recently one of them helped her buy a car so she can commute to her job and do her best to support herself.

Seeing how Christine lives has given me much to think about. Her kindness has been humbling. She has very little, but what little she had, she insisted on sharing with me. Hearing her story, and learning about the generosity of her community has inspired me to be, myself, a better friend and neighbor.

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*Photo by Constantino Diaz-Duran.

Constantino Diaz-Duran is a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. He is chronicling his walk from New York to Los Angeles to celebrate his eligibility for American citizenship. Follow Constantino’s progress.

I fell ill this week. Every year, for the last ten years, I’ve been stricken by tonsillitis. Sometimes it happens twice a year, and in 2007/2008 I got it three times in 12 months. I considered getting a tonsillectomy in New York before I hit the road, but the ENT doctor I saw discouraged it. I had been dreading getting it on the road, and alas, it has happened. My doctor called in a prescription for antibiotics, however, and I am already feeling better. The fever, at least, is gone. I will be able to keep going toward Austin this weekend.

Before I got sick, however, I was able to take in an Astros vs. Mets game at Minute Maid Park. As I’ve written before, I love baseball, so I’m making it a point to go to a game at every MLB city I visit during the walk. I also have a separate goal of visiting every Major League ballpark in the country.

So far, as part of the walk, I’ve been to games at Citizens Bank Park in Philly, Nationals Park, in DC, and now Minute Maid. The Braves weren’t in town when I was in Atlanta, so I didn’t get to see Turner Field. I’ll have to go back. In addition to these stadiums, I’ve been in the past to U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago, Camden Yards in Baltimore, CitiField in Queens (and Shea Stadium, before that), and of course, both the new and old Yankee Stadiums in The Bronx. I’m looking forward to seeing the Rangers in Dallas, the Diamondbacks in Phoenix, and the Dodgers when I get to LA—maybe I’ll even make it out to Anaheim to see the Angels.

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In life, I am first and foremost a Yankees fan—then an American, a New Yorker, and everything else. I cannot genuinely root for any other team, not even when the Yankees aren’t playing—it’s just never the same. But at Minute Maid Park last Tuesday, I at least tried to cheer for the Mets. I figured I should show a little New York pride. Boy, did they make it hard to cheer for them, though. They fell behind in the second inning, when Chris Johnson hit a three-run jack for the Astros, and ended up losing 6-3.

Of course the Yanks haven’t been doing great lately either, and now with Mariano Rivera’s injury, I’m starting to worry about the rest of the season. But I won’t be a Negative Nancy. My teams have done well in 2012; ‘Bama won the National Championship, the Giants the Superbowl, and I still believe my boys in pinstripes will win their 28th World Series.

A true baseball fan is always loyal, and hopeful—in a sense even naïve. Jacques Barzun, who famously wrote that “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball,” also pointed out this naïveté found both in baseball fandom and in our nation’s character. “We find also our American innocence in calling ‘World Series’ the annual games between the winners in each big league” he wrote. “The world doesn’t know or care and couldn’t compete if it wanted to, but since it’s us children having fun, why, the world is our stage.”

That is what baseball is about—fun. The crowd at Minute Maid wasn’t the most enthused I’ve ever seen, but even there, you saw grown men and women allowing themselves to act like children, chasing after a foul ball in the stands, eating Cracker Jack, dancing, kissing, and smiling for the camera. You saw, as in every stadium, Americans of all shapes, sizes, ages and colors, rallying together, cheering for their hometown team. I don’t know how much you can learn about Americans by studying the rules of baseball, but I do know that if you want to see what our country having fun looks like, a ballpark in the summer is the place to go.

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*Photo by Constantino Diaz-Duran.

Constantino Diaz-Duran is a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. He is chronicling his walk from New York to Los Angeles to celebrate his eligibility for American citizenship. Follow Constantino’s progress.

I left two abs in the Carolinas. Lost a couple more in Georgia. Six months in the South means my six-pack is gone. And it hasn’t been lack of exercise. It’s the food—the delicious, but for the most part unhealthy, food I’ve been eating.

I place a lot of value on fitness and nutrition, so the relative lack of control I have over my diet now has been one of the few aspects of the walk that I have found frustrating. I don’t like fast food, and I try to avoid processed foods and “empty carbs.” On walking days, I subsist on protein bars, nuts, and beef or turkey jerky. The problem with that is that most protein bars are just glorified candy bars, and jerky, of course, is loaded with sodium. Flavored jerky (like teriyaki) is lathered with sugar as well.

My parents raised me as a carnivore, and to this day I need at least some kind of meat in order to consider something a meal. I have also taught myself to appreciate fresh fruit and vegetables. In general, I believe that whatever doesn’t go bad is probably bad for you, and there is a fair amount of science to back up that belief. Alas, meat that hasn’t been salted stiff would go bad pretty quickly in my backpack, and tasty as some fermented fruit beverages are, my goal is not to drunk-walk across America.

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Then there are the mouthwatering and irresistible dishes I’ve been served on non-walking days. It would be offensive and ungrateful to refuse to eat what my new friends cook for me. But even more than that, I would be cheating myself out of what have been some of the most satisfying culinary experiences of my life. A couple of weeks ago, for example, I visited a town in Louisiana called Opelousas. There, I had the best jambalaya I’ve ever had. I ate more rice that day than I had in the last year—I even had boudin and cracklins for … (blushing) … breakfast!

But what’s a man to do? I’ve accepted that all I can do right now is damage control. And if I find that no one wants to date me when I’m back in New York, I’ll just lock myself up in a gym for a couple of months. Or I’ll move down South.

Jokes aside, however, I have been thinking a lot about nutrition in America. The first conclusion I’ve reached is that traditional dishes are not to blame for the much-hyped expansion of the nation’s waistlines. The truth is that barbecue, fried pickles and okra, crawfish, and other regional foods are not as unhealthy as a bag of potato chips or the highly processed meat-like products you get at the drive-thru. So I should apologize, now, for the jab at the South I took in the first paragraph. Southern food is not what has made me less lean, and it is not what is making America fat.

My other conclusion is that the push we have seen in the last decade toward healthier lifestyles is paying off. Yes, there is an obesity problem. The numbers say it, and the doctors I have met throughout the country have confirmed it. But most people “get it” now. Most people know they need to eat healthier and exercise more if they wish to live longer lives. Of course this doesn’t mean they’re necessarily doing something about it, but they at least think they should, and the optimist in me sees that as a start.

There is also the fact that I have seen (and used) gyms pretty much everywhere I’ve been. Healthy eating alternatives are also ubiquitous, which means the market for them has grown. All of this makes me hopeful. Adding to that hope is the fact that, true to the entrepreneurial American spirit, there are people across the country who are trying to find healthier alternatives to even traditional dishes. Last weekend, I visited with a friendly young family in Lake Charles, Louisiana. They follow the so-called “paleo diet,” and do CrossFit. They fed me the most delicious meals, including pizza (pictured above) and pancakes, all prepared with whole, healthy foods. And like them, I have met numerous others. Eating in America, I must conclude, is good, and it is getting healthier.

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*Photo by Constantino Diaz-Duran.

Constantino Diaz-Duran is a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. He is chronicling his walk from New York to Los Angeles to celebrate his eligibility for American citizenship. Follow Constantino’s progress.

Cheap drinks, live music, and bras hanging on clotheslines over the dance floor. Welcome to the Flora-Bama, the diviest dive bar I’ve ever set foot in. Located right by the Florida-Alabama state line, this joint is at the heart of the “Redneck Riviera.” Some 300 miles west in Lafayette, Louisiana—an almost straight shot on I-10 (or Hwy. 90 if, like me, you avoid interstates)—you’ll find the Blue Moon Saloon. If you’re in the mood for some good Cajun music, this is the place to go. The Flora-Bama and the Blue Moon have become two of my favorite bars on Earth, and I hereby declare them the best bars in the South.

The Flora-Bama is a far cry from places like the Boom Boom Room at the top of the Standard Hotel in New York City. But I’ve been up there, and as fun as those places can be, they don’t hold a candle to the easygoing atmosphere you find down here. And even if you want to see celebrities, you’ll find them at the Flora-Bama. Their Wikipedia entry claims that the Manning brothers and Kid Rock have been spotted at the bar. It also says that it was the inspiration for Jimmy Buffett’s song “Bama Breeze.”

I went to the Flora-Bama a couple of months ago with my adoptive Tuscaloosa parents, Lydia and Gary, and had a blast dancing to everything from Lynyrd Skynyrd to the Zac Brown Band. From the road, all you see is a bunch of trailers and a gravel parking lot. Behind them, under a big canopy, you’ll find the bar, stage, tables, and dance floor. The original building was destroyed by Hurricane Ivan in 2004, and the owners apparently decided not to fully rebuild to minimize loss in case of a new hit.

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The Blue Moon Saloon doubles as a guesthouse. They have bunk beds for under $25 a night and a few private rooms available for a little more. The rate gets you a ticket for a drink at the bar and admission to the live music shows on the back porch. They also have a great selection of local beer. I recommend you try the LA-31 Bière Pâle, a delicious pale ale that goes great with a healthy serving of gumbo, jambalaya, or crawfish étouffée.

Last Saturday I got to see Dick Dale at the Blue Moon. I stood just feet away from him, and admission was only $20. It doesn’t get much better than that. “The King of the Surf Guitar” is 74 years old and a cancer survivor. You wouldn’t know from seeing him on stage. (Watch him perform in Seattle in January.) Dale has been performing since the mid-1950s, but younger fans will be most familiar with his rendition of “Misirlou,” which was included on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack.

I never expected to see a legend perform in such a great space when I came to Lafayette, but these kinds of surprises have made this journey great, and places like the Blue Moon and the Flora-Bama are full of them.

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*Photo by Constantino Diaz-Duran.

Constantino Diaz-Duran is a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. He is chronicling his walk from New York to Los Angeles to celebrate his eligibility for American citizenship. Follow Constantino’s progress.

Tom Vanderbilt at Slate is writing a series about “the crisis in American walking.” This week’s piece contains some interesting data, including the fact that the average American takes 5,117 steps each day, compared to 9,695 by the average Australian, 9,650 by the Swiss, and 7,168 by the Japanese. In other words, we come in last among industrialized nations when it comes to walking.

This #FirstWorldProblem is serious, says Vanderbilt, because walking has many benefits. Walking, he says, reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s, makes you smarter, reduces depression, lowers blood pressure, and raises your self-esteem. Walking more would make us a healthier, smarter, happier nation. But how do we get more people walking, when most of our cities have been designed for the automobile?

Vanderbilt writes that there is a stigma attached to being a pedestrian, and he’s right. Not owning a car is, in most places, extremely uncool. No one, TLC reminds us, wants “no scrub, hanging out the passenger side of his best friend’s ride.”

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What I’m doing makes me an eccentric. Some people think it’s “cool,” others tell me it’s “awesome,” but everyone asks me “why?” When I tell them I’ve become friends with others who have walked across the country, their jaws drop. And when I say that I don’t ever want to own a car again, they declare me officially insane. Now, I grant that walking from one coast to the other is extreme, but I agree with Vanderbilt that it is important to make our cities more walkable and to promote this activity.

Walkability is one of the reasons I choose to live in New York. I loved Charlotte and would consider moving there because it has a walkable city center. The same goes for Philly, D.C., and Richmond. But when you think of how much of the country I’ve covered already, it’s pretty sad that I can only come up with a few alternatives to New York City (I’m not counting Chicago, though I like it there, because it’s not part of this walking tour). Not even Atlanta, the great metropolis of the South, makes the cut.

The purpose of my walk is to learn about the country and my fellow Americans—I’m not out to proselytize about anything, not even fitness or other things I value highly. But I am glad someone is calling attention to this “crisis in walking.” In my own way, I’ve tried to encourage people to exercise more, but I know that’s just a drop in the bucket. A nationwide effort is needed to make walking less pedestrian, and more exciting.

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*Photo by Constantino Diaz-Duran.

Constantino Diaz-Duran is a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. He is chronicling his walk from New York to Los Angeles to celebrate his eligibility for American citizenship. Follow Constantino’s progress.

I was introduced this week to the concept of “summer teeth”: sum’er here, sum’er there; sum’er this way, sum’er that way. You’ll find several examples of summer teeth in this clip from HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

I first watched that video when I was in Alabama. Now I’m in Mississippi, where the footage was filmed. Maher claims that the filmmaker “cut out 20 people who also did not have teeth.” He says they had to edit the footage so that it didn’t look like everyone was missing teeth. That’s probably the case—I’m sure a lot of the people they talked to had suffered from a severe case of summertime in the mouth. But I don’t buy the claim that they didn’t seek these folks out.

You find what you look for, and the Real Time team was looking for rednecks who vote Republican and hate Obama. It’s TV, it’s entertainment, and it’s a misrepresentation of what people here actually look like. In five months in the Deep South, I have definitely seen people with crooked teeth, but they have been few and far between. The vast majority of southerners—yes, even Republican, anti-Obama southerners—have good teeth.

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Now I should probably admit that I have approached my journey with optimism, seeking the good in people and in this country. So maybe that is why I’ve found what I’ve found. But I have no use for rose-colored glasses, and I’m still very much an outsider here. I’ve met people who look askance at me because of my accent, and people who do it because I come from New York. I’m not blind, and I don’t shy away from pointing out problems when I see them. Summer teeth, I assure you, are not a widespread problem.

One of the biggest lessons I’m learning is that, as diverse as our country is, this diversity is fairly homogeneous. What I mean by that is that every region of this country is diverse in similar ways. That diversity includes uneducated “rednecks,” and let’s be honest—they, too, are everywhere.

A trip I took to Long Island a couple of years ago comes to mind. I was flying to Wisconsin to visit my sister, and I got a cheap flight out of the Islip airport. I took the Long Island Railroad from Penn Station to Ronkonkoma, and then I had to take a cab from the train to the airport. And let me tell you, my cabbie’s teeth that day were as summery as summer gets.

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*Photo by Constantino Diaz-Duran.

Constantino Diaz-Duran is a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. He is chronicling his walk from New York to Los Angeles to celebrate his eligibility for American citizenship. Follow Constantino’s progress.

Nothing like some hair metal to get you off your rear and back on the road. “I was born,” it seems, “to walk alone.” So “I’ve made up my mind, I ain’t wasting no more time,” and “here I go again on my own.”

You need a sense of humor to undertake a task like mine. I don’t want to look like a crazy person, so I’m not actually head-banging down the road, but I’m rocking out at heart. I’ve been away from home too long, you see, and I’m ready to go back. I also can’t wait to see the rest of this beautiful country, and jump into the Pacific.

I needed the break I took in Alabama, and I see it now even more than I did when I got here. The walk down from New York was a shock to my very core. The hours upon hours I spent alone forced me to do a soul-search that I never saw coming. Virtue, I believe, is being the best version of yourself that you can be. And looking back on the last year, I see that I have, indeed, become a better me. The thoughts I couldn’t escape, the realities I had to face, had left me disoriented.

Family concerns—matters of the heart—weighed upon me as I tried to do my job of exploring the meaning of being American. In order to go on, I needed to get back my bearings. I needed to see how this changed man fit in my life, in this journey, in this project. I never imagined that it would be in the South where I would rediscover my voice. This land of surprises and sugar-coated roughness has taught me more about America than I ever imagined.

I have learned, for example, that my journey, while unique in its own way, is quintessentially American. We are a nation of individuals who act like we’ve got it all figured out, but really, we’re just in the process.

The South, for all its faults, is at least self-aware. I’ve heard racist remarks, and plenty of them—as a New Yorker, my eyes bugged out the first time I heard someone casually use the word “Oriental,” and when someone remarked about “all them Jews [we] have up there.” No one here pretends that there’s no racial tension, and yet I’ve seen more interracial couples here than anywhere else.

What I’ve realized is that prejudice here is abstract and collective in an almost (I hesitate to use the word) benign way. What I mean is that southerners will run off at the mouths about groups—about abstract “theys”—but when it comes to one-on-one interactions, the racism is superficial. A guy will rant about black people, and use the N-word, only to later call his best buddy, who happens to be black, and rant about something completely different. It’s an odd kind of colorblindness.

In the South, people know where they stand even if they’re not entirely sure where they’re going. And that is where I find myself.

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*Photo by Constantino Diaz-Duran.

Constantino Diaz-Duran is a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. He is chronicling his walk from New York to Los Angeles to celebrate his eligibility for American citizenship. Follow Constantino’s progress.

Most of my hosts throughout the walk have been young parents and grandparents. A topic that invariably comes up when we talk about the state of the country is education. During my stay in Alabama I have met many families who have chosen to homeschool their children. One of them is my friend Alina, whom I’ve known for more than 10 years. I was intrigued by her and her husband’s decision to teach their kids at home, because they didn’t really fit the image I had of homeschooling families. By meeting them and their friends I’ve learned that the way most of the media portrays this trend (if we may call it that) is not entirely fair.

I asked Alina to sit down with me and have a conversation about her choice to homeschool. I recorded it so I could share it with my readers. This is my first podcast, but I plan to make more use of this medium as I complete the walk to L.A. I hope you find it interesting and that you’ll join the conversation in the comments section.

Listen to my interview with Alina here.

Check out these links, which helped me learn a little more about homeschooling:
http://www.homeeducator.com/HSN/
http://www.homeschool.com/
http://localhs.com/

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*Photo by Constantino Diaz-Duran.

Constantino Diaz-Duran is a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. He is chronicling his walk from New York to Los Angeles to celebrate his eligibility for American citizenship. Follow Constantino’s progress.

I’ve always loved looking up. In New York City, the sight of skyscrapers towering toward heaven inspires me. It reminds me of the greatness of the human mind, and all we have achieved. Here in the South, I have fallen in love with the sky. I also love that it’s February, and I can still walk around in just jeans and a t-shirt. I know it’s cold up north, so I made this video for y’all—a window into summer, to maybe warm your day up a little.

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*Photo by Constantino Diaz-Duran.