<p>I do think the “where are you from” question is much more important in the East (and I mean mainly the Northeast) than in the West, but it’s a question that operates on many levels. I’ve been in small towns in rural New England where someone moving in from the outside would be seen as an outsider even after 20 years of residency. In Manhattan, on the other hand, most people you meet in professional settings are from somewhere else; but I’ve still felt there was a certain tendency to try to pigeonhole people by region of origin, by ethnicity, by educational background, and so on. “Where did you go to school?” (meaning college) and even, in certain circles, “Where did you prep?” are questions you’ll hear frequently in the Northeast; much less so in other parts of the country. </p>
<p>I had a roommate in grad school who was very proudly working class Irish Catholic, born-and-bred in Queens, son of a NYC cop, who insisted Manhattanites as a whole were"not real New Yorkers" because they “were all from someplace else.” On the other hand, many people I knew in Manhattan regarded Manhattanites as the only “true New Yorkers,” unlike the “borough people” who were just that, not really of or from “the City,” a less cosmopolitan (and implicitly less worthy) lot.</p>
<p>In contrast, one becomes accepted as a Californian almost instantly. Well, perhaps upon acquiring a California driver’s license, but that can happen pretty fast. No one much cares where you came from, where you went to school, or who your people are. Everyone came from somewhere else, in many cases in part to get away from confining structures of class, ethnicity, neighborhood, religion, educational pedigree, and such. Those structures tend to be much looser in the West; in the East, they still operate as an important part of the social fabric, a big part of how people are organized and how many people make sense of their own world and their place in it, and how they perceive others. The pigeonholing that goes on isn’t necessarily closed-minded or mean-spirited; it’s just a handy heuristic, though like any heuristic it’s only so accurate and it may result in a lot of inappropriate stereotyping.</p>
<p>That said, business and professional circles in places like Manhattan and Washington, DC are much more of a meritocracy, open to new entrants so long as they come with the right educational credentials and professional chops. That’s also true to a considerable degree at elite colleges and universities. Yet I think a certain amount of pigeonholing still goes on. I’m sorry to report that my D1, who has actually lived more of her life in the Northeast than in the Midwest (with a year in California sandwiched in between), faced a certain amount of it upon her arrival at her Northeastern LAC. Naturally she was asked “Where are you from?” She would explain that she mostly grew up in New York City but was now living in Minnesota, but the only part of that answer the other students would hear was “Minnesota,” whereupon someone would invariably fall into an exaggerated version of the already-exaggerated Minnesota/North Dakota accent used by the characters in the movie “Fargo” (produced and directed by native Minnesotans Joel and Ethan Coen who knew how to overplay the accent of some, especially rural, Minnesotans to comic effect). They’d then ask my daughter to “speak Minnesotan” and express amazement and disappointment that she didn’t sound at all like they expected. In other words, that she didn’t conform to their cultural stereotype. It wasn’t intended to be demeaning or hurtful, though at some level it was; and at some level it was a statement that the stereotype was more important to them than getting to know the person. Interestingly, though, stuff like that has actually driven my D into being more of a Midwesterner and a Minnesotan than she was when she left for college. She had always considered herself a displaced New Yorker, until she went back to the Northeast where she felt she wasn’t really fully accepted, stereotyped as an outsider. Now she’s much more inclined to come back to Minnesota whenever she can, she more thoroughly embraces it as “home,” and is starting to think about how she could make a life here after college.</p>