Tuesday was the Fourth of July – a major event in my last home, but here in Mexico City, not much of a celebration. I saw all of the posts on social media featuring pictures of barbecue and red, white and blue desserts while I was having steamed artichokes and leftovers and walking the Gordo in the rain. Here in Mexico City, the Fourth of July is any other day. Everyone went to work, there was traffic and smog and no celebration. Reading the patriotic Facebook posts got me thinking about what it’s like to be an American abroad, aside from the obvious lack of celebration on the Fourth of July.

I was not very patriotic when I was growing up. I was the kid who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in seventh grade. In college I was the first to criticize the government, despite my relative ignorance of policy issues. When I went abroad, for the first time I was an American surrounded by people from other countries, instead of being an American surrounded by Americans. My friends from Germany and Japan and Spain criticized my whole country, and then added nonchalantly, “Except you of course.” Even if these were the same critiques I myself had made when I was living in the U.S., when someone else said them it didn’t feel so good. My foreign friends were talking about my parents, my cousins, my American friends, and they didn’t even know them.

I grew up in Southern California, only a couple of hours north of Los Angeles, but about a world away. My grandfather was a cattle rancher and I was raised on potato salad, hamburgers, and a firm belief that you do not need a towel for your hands if you are wearing jeans. Although my home town is only about 40 minutes from the beach, the quintessential American imagery of a midwestern farmhouse, apple pie, the Marlboro man and a Ford truck commercial never fail to make me nostalgic, regardless of my feelings about cigarettes and Ford trucks. The images are meaningful not only because they remind me of a barbecue with the neighbors after a branding and family holidays. They are meaningful because they represent the ethics of the America that I believe I was raised in.

In my version of America, if you work hard you’ll get ahead. The color of your skin or your religion don’t matter, and immigrants are welcomed. That’s the America I was raised to believe in. That America is the opposite of the America I have criticized – the America that supported military coups throughout Latin America, whose citizens are monolingual, overweight and don’t have passports. The real America is much more complicated than either of those – my perspective of an ideal America was created by my upbringing in a small, largely white and middle class town. While my family had the chance to work hard and have a good life, there were plenty of others who didn’t have those opportunities because of their race.

A few months ago a friend posted on Facebook that we would all be “proud Americans,” and I wonder what she thinks we should be proud of. If she meant we should be proud of the country that I believe I was raised in, then I am. If she meant I should be proud of the real America, the one that struggles with racial issues and whose citizens don’t reliably have access to health care, then I am proud only to the extent that we keep trying to make it better. If she meant I should be proud of our current President’s protectionist policies, and proposed laws that will benefit the wealthy and rob thousands of health insurance, I don’t see how to be proud of that.

Today, the American President fosters a climate of hostility, and as an American living abroad, I get asked about that over just about every meal with friends. “So, Trump…” people say. Mexicans don’t often make blanket statements criticizing all Americans, and are just as quick to call out their own president as they are ours. They don’t make the mistake of thinking that POTUS’s tweets represent the sentiments of an entire nation. They do worry about what the future might hold for Mexico with Mr. Trump leading the United States though.

I find that living outside of the U.S. gives me a different perspective on my country. I have a point of comparison which gives me a different perspective on life in America – what’s better and what’s not. Living in Latin America I find that people are generally aware of some of the things America has done as a country to influence the region – things that are not nice and rarely spoken of in the U.S. The America that has projected itself into Latin America is not the America that I was raised to believe in. It’s a different version of the real and complicated America, where ends justify means and hegemony must be protected.

In the end, being a United States citizen living abroad is as complicated as the country itself. I love the version of my country I was raised to believe in – the country of Jefferson and Lincoln – but I do not love all of the things that country has done. Living abroad means embracing both the ideal of what America was intended to be, what we hope for it, and the reality that as a government run by men, sometimes it makes bad decisions. So, at the start of the U.S. – Mexico soccer match when I’m the only one in the bar singing the anthem, it’s for the ideal America that I was raised to believe in, and also for the complicated reality of a country that I must believe, keeps trying to be better.