From Colombia

This is the translation of an article that I wrote in Octuber, 2010. It is about my point of view on the habit of Spanish speakers to call people and things from the United States 'americanos' (American), when a correct name exists: estadounidenses (something like Unitedstaters). Last week I attended the presentation of the Unitedstater Studies Institute (Instituto de Estudios Estadounidenses) in Bogota, Colombia, attracted by the posibility of getting to know something else about the United States, county which I like since my childhood and in which I have had the chance of living briefly somewhen. What attracted my attention the most was the name of the institute itself. Its name is  Unitedstater Studies Institute and not American like some others which exist in some Spanish-speaking countries. And I believe that  Unitedstater is the correct name for the people born and nationalized in the United States. Not American because that name belong to all the inhabitants o...

El Dorado is a legend place sought unsuccessfully by Spaniard and English explorers for centuries. Many of them died in the attempt. It was suposed to be a place with gold-paved streets with huge reserves of the precious metal, located somewhere in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela and Brazil. DreamWorks produced an animated movie about El Dorado (The Road to El Dorado) but it was located erroneously in Mexico. There are several version of the legend in different places but the most accepted is the one in Colombia where in a lagoon nearby Bogota (39 miles) the chief of Muisca indians used to be covered in gold dust on a rift, in a rite in which he and other indians paid tributo to the Mother Earth by throwing gold and emerald pieces into the lagoon.   After many years of wanting to go to get to know the Muisca sacred lagoon, and despite the close it is to my hometown, yesterday I went with my family and got surprised of the much I learned about my ancestors. The first s...