A fascinating analysis by Manuel Garcia, a Cuban-Puerto Rican American who grew up on the Upper West side of New York, on who are really the true Americans. We recommend reading it in its entirety. Here's some quotes:

I pledge allegiance to the flag
Of the altered states in America
And to the republic-of-dreams for which it stands,
One nation under the gods, the goddesses,
The spirits of the ancestors,
And the great unknowable void,
With liberty to imagine justice
For all.

Are you an American?" I've been asked since I can remember and to this day. I'm never sure, let's just say I'm trying. Being born here is not enough. I know, I was, and still most Americans think I'm a foreigner. I was born in the upper West Side -- Spanish Harlem -- in the time of Machito. I have a black moustache (well, had) and a permanent tan "to die for" -- if your skin is plucked-chicken white and you can afford the "color." I've been taken for every kind of Latino (I'm Cuban-Puerto Rican), for Egyptian, Persian, Turkish, and even black.

When you understand what it means to be a real American, then you can see that most Cubans are real Americans, where most Floridians are not; that most Mexicans are real Americans while most Californians are not; and that many immigrants will never be real Americans, though probably most always were. If this essay makes no sense to you, then you are sober in your delusions, for I am drunk in my insights. Insight knows itself to be particular, whereas delusion imagines itself to be general. This separates Carlos Castañeda from John Ashcroft. If you don't like my icons, then pick your own, just make sure they are real, like Crazy Horse and Noam Chomsky, instead of fakes like George Armstrong Custer and Henry Kissinger. If this rant makes any sense to you, then you are capable of seeing that the America that will survive into the 22nd century, in peace and security, is as remote from the America of George W. Bush as that of Mark Twain was from J. P. Morgan's, or Kurt Vonnegut's is from Richard Nixon's.

Mr. Garcia is as much of an American as we are and you are. Don't you feel shame that he is treated differently? We do.