this is a song about Pan-Americanism and one of the centers of Pan-American thought, New York City. i see a lot of people, and on Lemmy, in particular, not understanding what Pan-Americanism is. Pan-Americanism is not a pro-Americanism stance that just wants the otherecountries of the western hemisphere to get their benefits from the western empire. Pan-Americanism is an anti-colonial framework of thinking that views all oppressed peoples living under the yoke of the western empire as being in actuality a single people who should be working together to resist Americanism and create a new, non-imperial, system of being that would see all people of the Western hemisphere sharing in the benefits of peaceful cooperation.

New York City is one of the centers for Pan-Americanism because it’s where a lot of people indigenous to the Western hemisphere wind up for work and find themselves discovering that many of the separations between the people living in the Western hemisphere are completely arbitrary.

some people who mistake Pan-Americanism for Americanism often question "if it’s anti-Americanist, why is it called Pan-Americanism and not something that centers indigenous labels in the discussion? the simple answer is that the indigenous people called the Americas many different things. they were not a monolith and they needed a shared label to be pan-[that label] and the only really shared name, cross culturally, for The Americas, is The Americas, thus, Pan-Americanism