¿DE DONDE ERES?

Spanish 101, chapter 2. How do you respond when someone asks you where you're from? With a state? a city or town? or a county, as some of my students in NC and WV did? "Soy de Tucker County."

And do you respond with the place you were born? The place you lived the longest? Or the place where you are now? For some people those would all be the same place, but not for los jubilados.

In Spanish class I usually said, "soy de Philadelphia" because I was born there and I like to think of myself as a rootless cosmopolitan (pace Mao), even though I'm not. Not sure what I'll say in Mexico. Folks there have never heard of WV. In fact some folks in the US, I've found, haven't either: "Oh, western Virginia."

In rural NC, where we lived for 22 years, people used to ask: "Where y'all stayin'?" As if we were itinerants (perhaps we were, as it turns out) or migrant laborers living as seasonal tenants. It may be the case that they had it right: where you are staying--residing at the moment--just might be where you are from, in the only sense that matters. Where we are is where we are from.