Constantino Diaz-Duran is a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. He is chronicling his walk from New York to Los Angeles to celebrate his eligibility for American citizenship. Follow Constantino’s progress.

Nothing like some hair metal to get you off your rear and back on the road. “I was born,” it seems, “to walk alone.” So “I’ve made up my mind, I ain’t wasting no more time,” and “here I go again on my own.”

You need a sense of humor to undertake a task like mine. I don’t want to look like a crazy person, so I’m not actually head-banging down the road, but I’m rocking out at heart. I’ve been away from home too long, you see, and I’m ready to go back. I also can’t wait to see the rest of this beautiful country, and jump into the Pacific.

I needed the break I took in Alabama, and I see it now even more than I did when I got here. The walk down from New York was a shock to my very core. The hours upon hours I spent alone forced me to do a soul-search that I never saw coming. Virtue, I believe, is being the best version of yourself that you can be. And looking back on the last year, I see that I have, indeed, become a better me. The thoughts I couldn’t escape, the realities I had to face, had left me disoriented.

Family concerns-matters of the heart-weighed upon me as I tried to do my job of exploring the meaning of being American. In order to go on, I needed to get back my bearings. I needed to see how this changed man fit in my life, in this journey, in this project. I never imagined that it would be in the South where I would rediscover my voice. This land of surprises and sugar-coated roughness has taught me more about America than I ever imagined.

I have learned, for example, that my journey, while unique in its own way, is quintessentially American. We are a nation of individuals who act like we’ve got it all figured out, but really, we’re just in the process.

The South, for all its faults, is at least self-aware. I’ve heard racist remarks, and plenty of them-as a New Yorker, my eyes bugged out the first time I heard someone casually use the word “Oriental,” and when someone remarked about “all them Jews [we] have up there.” No one here pretends that there’s no racial tension, and yet I’ve seen more interracial couples here than anywhere else.

What I’ve realized is that prejudice here is abstract and collective in an almost (I hesitate to use the word) benign way. What I mean is that southerners will run off at the mouths about groups-about abstract “theys”-but when it comes to one-on-one interactions, the racism is superficial. A guy will rant about black people, and use the N-word, only to later call his best buddy, who happens to be black, and rant about something completely different. It’s an odd kind of colorblindness.

In the South, people know where they stand even if they’re not entirely sure where they’re going. And that is where I find myself.

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*Photo by Constantino Diaz-Duran.