What is considered an American?

An American is generally considered to be any person who is a citizen of the United States of America, regardless of their background, ethnicity, or place of birth. Legally, you are American if you were born in the United States, including Puerto Rico, Guam, and other territories, under birthright citizenship, or if you were born abroad to American citizen parents, or if you have become a naturalized citizen through immigration. Culturally, the term is broader and includes people who live permanently in the US, share in American society, and identify with American culture, even if they are not yet citizens. In everyday usage, when people around the world say Americans, they mean people from the USA, not from all of North and South America, even though technically everyone from the Americas is American in a continental sense. In the United States itself, there is no official ethnic definition of American, it is a nationality based on citizenship and allegiance, not on race or religion. So someone can be Mexican-American, African-American, Chinese-American, and still fully American in both legal and cultural terms.