A Dutch Expatriat’s Musing about Euro-Americans

Life as a refugee, ex-pat, or immigrant shares one unmistakable trait: the audacity to plant roots in foreign soil. We’re all just transplants with different labels—though, isn’t it curious how some get to skip the “immigrant” designation entirely? Those who crossed the Atlantic centuries ago now simply call themselves “Americans,” while carefully hyphenating everyone else: African-Americans, Native-Americans, and Asian-Americans.
Quite the selective memory, considering nearly every “American” is actually a Euro-American, just a few generations removed from their own immigrant story.

I got my cosmic wake-up call the night my friend became an impromptu acrobat, leaping from my window while my ex-boyfriend demonstrated his door-demolition skills.
When a lone police officer arrived to find my face rearranged and my door in splinters, I knew I was living on borrowed time. So, leaving not just studies but a sociopath behind who treated eviction notices like love letters.
The frozen kittens in my freezer (oven-baked first because, apparently, that’s how psychopaths operate) were the final straw.

So I did what any reasonable person would do: packed for a holiday and developed a convenient case of missed-flight syndrome. Ibiza beckoned with its siren song of sun, sea, and endless dancing.
Enter stage left: the most gorgeous devil you’ve ever seen, who decided my hair needed an impromptu styling and my wallet required emptying.
But fortune favours the foolish – my guardian angel, though clearly nursing a hangover, managed to place an actually decent human in my path.
Before long, I was earning my keep dancing at Ku, living the dream until reality crashed the party.

When the seasonal exodus began, I found myself in a peculiar predicament: no home, no friends, no family, and absolutely no grasp of the local lingo. Early ’90s Spain wasn’t exactly a bastion of multilingualism – unless you counted their politically charged regional dialects and a smattering of French among the educated elite.
So there I was, learning Spanish using Spider-Man comics as a scaffold to grasp Spanish structure. I then solidified my knowledge with children’s books to master essential vocabulary and cultural nuances.

The climate was friendly enough, even if the houses seemed allergic to temperatures below 20 degrees, and the concept of indoor socializing was practically taboo.
Banking was still stuck in the pre-Rothschild era, and furniture was treated like family heirlooms – sacred and scarce.
My official status remained in limbo until pregnancy finally earned me a foreigner’s number, though the bureaucrats never missed a chance to remind me of my imminent deportation date.

But youth and determination are powerful allies. Armed with anthropological insight and entrepreneurial creativity, I waged war on backward thinking.
When my one-year-old needed care (her father being a well-heeled melancholic who’s since departed his mortal coil), salvation came in the form of an inland nursery, complete with sheep brain stew and a grandmother wide enough to cuddle four children simultaneously.

The moral of this tale is that money speaks any language, whether you’re clutching thalers, daalders, or euros.
We’re all just humans living under arbitrary lines drawn on maps. Perhaps it’s time for those who simply call themselves “Americans” to embrace their own hyphen – Euro-Americans – and acknowledge that their story, like mine, began with someone choosing to leave “home.”
After all, if we’re going to hyphenate some Americans, shouldn’t we hyphenate all of them?

May harmony find you,

Irena Phaedra

P.S. Speaking of American amnesia, here’s a delicious morsel of irony: That almighty Dollar, the very symbol of American economic might? It’s just another European immigrant that forgot its roots. Born as a “Joachimsthaler” in a Bohemian valley (try saying that after a few Pilsners), it packed its bags and went Dutch as a “Daalder” before sneaking into New Amsterdam.

There, like many European transplants, it got an English makeover and became the “Dollar” – dropping its accent and pretending it had always spoken English. Funny how even currencies can suffer from convenient memory loss about their Old World origins.