How distance changes perception: The making of an observer

During a lunch with my friend Kurt at the Chicago Club—one of those quietly elegant institutions where history sits comfortably in the room—I arrived with a question. It was one that could only be asked by someone trying to understand the United States from outside its horizon. Kurt’s surname carries enough S’s and K’s to suggest Eastern European roots. I am Brazilian, the grandson of Italians, Portuguese, Ukrainians, and with some Indigenous blood. Our grandparents crossed oceans from similar places, yet our lives unfolded inside different societies. I asked him: If our families had boarded different ships—mine arriving at Ellis Island and his in Brazil—would we have become different people? Was history shaped by conviction, or sometimes merely by direction? Only later did I understand the real question was about perception, how distance changes what a society looks like from within and from afar. In North America, immigrants often gathered within familiar communities. In Brazil, some