We at American Uproot agree and we’re on a mission to find other Americans who share this same sensibility. American Uproot is a video project that seeks to create an Expat travel series featuring destinations like Madrid, Marrakech, Nassau and Abu Dhabi, where living, working people from the United States give tours of their new overseas destinations…The places we want to visit, you call home.
In today’s heated climate of nationalism, closed borders and immigration, we often limit our perspective to those entering the USA, good or bad. But what about those leaving? Who are they, and why do they go? In the 1920’s and 30’s artists and writers such as Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Faulkner, James Joyce, Dali, and Picasso left their respective homelands for intellectual and artistic pursuits which they could not readily find back home. They lived their lives abroad, many of them penniless, sitting in cafes, writing, dreaming and suffering with an existential sense of purpose. Hemingway writes in The Sun Also Rises,“You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.”
While we don’t believe this new generation of Expatriates and Digital Nomads leaves the United States for exactly the same reasons, or, likewise, has the same experiences (although, hello! Who doesn’t want to sit in a café in Europe all day long???), there is a definite trend in Americans seeking a better life abroad. Is America no longer a brave new world? What happened to the American Dream? Or are Americans just enjoying the freedom of planting new roots in a more globally-minded world? Researched studies on trending migrations of Americans leaving their homeland tell one story. We’d like to tell another. We’d like to get down on the ground and talk to the people who have made the move overseas. More importantly, we’d like to explore their new foreign land and bring you with us.
American Uproot 