It should not be socially acceptable to make fun of anywhere but being the prideful, tribal, territorial beings we are, I am sure it will continue nonetheless.

It happens all the time to me on the East Coast. I agree with Katie that it is basically any state not in the Northeast or West Coast and the easterners will look down on you. I am used to it and joke right along with them, especially if they are an uptight New Englander.

I grew up with no hometown (moved alot), so, I have always just said I am from wherever I am living. When I first move to a new location, I say, “I moved here from ____.” When people press it and ask where I grew up, I just say I moved alot and tend to highlight the cooler areas. Now my parents live in San Diego so sometimes I say there, even though my parents moved there when I graduated from HS. I skim over my years in Oklahoma and Texas (hi Katie) because those get a very negative reaction, especially in Cali. In Texas, people didn’t like it when I was ‘from’ Cali.

Anyone who has lived in the South will know that you have to be entrenched for at least two, preferably three generations before you can be considered a true Southerner. I personally grew up in New Orleans (despite being born in Provo) and was never really considered to be from New Orleans. Not only was my accent not very strong (note: the accent in NO sounds more like Brooklyn than Alabama) but my parents had no accent to speak of. However, since most people simply assumed my parents were from elsewhere and I was native, I didn’t get harassed as much as other students I knew who were truly from Utah.

On the other hand, I’ve only in recent years started to admit to the fact that I was born in Provo. I still generally get away with saying “I was born in Provo but I lived in New Orleans from the time I was 2″. After that, most non-New Orleanians jump right to asking about New Orleans and forget to ask where the heck Provo is.

And to come full circle, I now live in Provo. 3 blocks from the hospital where I was born.

I was born in Provo while my parents were attending BYU in the 70s. After a couple years, we moved to my father’s native South Dakota (my mom’s a native of Washington state) where he went to medical school and completed his internship. I had just finished second grade when my parents decided to move to Richfield, Utah where my dad had a chance to open up a private family medicine practice.

We lived in Richfield for 6 years. Enough time for me to complete elementary school and middle school.

My family would still be in Richfield except for the special education needs of my younger brother (which couldn’t be met in a rural community). So we moved to Provo right after I completed middle school.

I went through high school in Provo. After that, I served a mission in Japan and returned to Provo and enrolled in Utah Valley State College, and then Brigham Young University, where I got married and completed my undergraduate degree.

After that, my wife and I moved to Laramie, Wyoming where I completed law school. While there, we took shopping trips to Colorado’s Front Range. We liked the area so much, we moved there and set up a private law practice.

I’ve been a few places. And I’ll admit that I felt a real need to get out of Utah. The culture is just a touch overbearing. Laramie was a real breath of fresh air. And I really like living in Boulder county.

But I’m a Utahn.

There’s a touch of South Dakota and Wyoming in there (and Japan too). But I’m a native Utahn as far as I’m concerned.

I’m not the least bit embarrassed about this and will tell people proudly (most of my clients know I’m Utahn). Those who don’t like it can kiss off.

Are you sure you aren’t projecting a sense of shame when you state your place of origin Tagore? People pick up on that. It may be your tone that encourages the condolences. If so, the issue really isn’t how other people see your ethnicity, but how you see it yourself.

No one criticizes Utah in front of me. I don’t present it as an option. And if they did choose to sneer, it would lessen my opinion of them.

You proud, prejudiced Westerners! How dare you assume “The Bay Area” can only refer to San Francisco. I may have been born in Sacramento but we moved to The Bay Area — Chesapeake Bay, the only real “Bay Area” as far as I’m concerned — when I was 11 months old.

Okay, tongue-in-cheek aside, that is really annoying. I ran into someone on a forum once whose name referenced the Bay Area. I asked him which Bay he meant and all he’d say was “The Bay.” I asked him, “Chesapeake?” (that being the one that immediately comes to MY mind, as well as the several million living there I’m sure) “San Francisco?” “Hudson’s?” and all he’d say, like I was supposed to know and what kind of idiot was I for not knowing, was “The Bay.”

And no, it should not be socially acceptable to make fun of anybody’s home, be it Utah or Lake Titicaca, regardless of whether or not anyone in the conversation appears to be from there. You might share amusing anecdotes about any experiences you’ve had there, but simply repeating ignorance and prejudice is small-minded and mean-spirited, I don’t care how “urbane” or “sophisticated” the company.

No question that Utah is weird. However, while I can make fun of my family, you better not. Rather than joking along with people, my favorite tactic these days is to fight back. Recently a guy from Florida said something disparaging about Utah to a group of people who all knew I was from Utah. I couldn’t think of anything particularly negative about Florida, so I just replied incredulously, “This is coming from a guy from Florida?!” Surprisingly, the guy got all embarrassed and just kind of shut up.

Robert, you’ve heard the joke about having children in the South, right?

If you move to Texas and have a child, that doesn’t make your child a Texan. If your climbs in the oven to have kittens, that doesn’t make them biscuits.

I’ve never lived in Utah. I’ve visited once or twice, and it’s a lovely place. Having only ever been a member in the so-called Mission field (only four stakes in the city, can you imagine?), the Utah Implants did not always endear themselves to the locals. Between criticism of how we do things and their constant whining “I miss the mountains,” it was enough to make me want to pass the hat and buy them a one way ticket home if they’d just shut up already.

But once you get past the funny accents and the extreme red state tendencies, the people are very nice and it’s a lovely place. I’d be happy to live there if there weren’t so many Mormons. It’s way more fun to be an oppressed minority than to be the oppressors.

I saw a t-shirt once that read “I wasn’t born in [place], but I got here as soon as I could.” For those of us who weren’t born where we call home, that expresses my perfect idea of love for the adopted place with a little dash of pride in having earned for oneself the privilege of living there.

My father was born in Redding, California and his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents are buried there and in the adjacent Trinity County. I always thought of that area as northern California, but it seems most people think of northern California as a small area around San Francisco. I complained when I lived in Los Angeles about the difficulty in communicating the location of the large portion of the state that lies as much as 300 miles north of San Francisco. One person laughed that he tended to think of that region as part of Oregon.

Tagore, I’m not from Utah, but I’d wear that shirt with pride as well. In fact, I’m from Idaho and once saw a t-shirt that had a picture of the state of Idaho on it that read as follows: “Idaho, no….Udaho!” I’d wear that shirt proudly to any ward activity or any non Sunday ward mtg of any sort.

What freak me out about Utah, having been raised in the south, is that if you say “sir” or “M’am” people think you’re sassing them!

I personally think SLC has matured into a very nice city. Last time I was there I was impressed at how nice it had become. The mountains are truly beautiful. However, that does not mean that I could live there. I am not sure. My brother (inactive mormon) who lives there has been able to make it work.
As a joke, I often refer to Utah as “The Belly of the Beast.” Only once have I received a negative reaction to the comment. He was a fresh missionary from somewhere north of SLC. He was not amused.

I really don’t care if people make fun of Utah, as long as there isn’t any real malice or it isn’t being taken seriously.

I also get a kick out of people who say, I went to BYU and I can tell you I know the state and would never want to live there. Yeah, going to school at the Y doesn’t really give you a great idea of what living in the state is like.

Then there’s the whole Northern Utah is Ogden, eastern Utah is heber and central utah is provo mentality. That makes me laugh too.

annegb–I totally can relate to the whole “you’re not from here unless you’re family’s been there for 5 generations.” My parents moved to Vernal when I was four and they still live there. Even though I went to school there, I got the whole, “you’re a transplant” the whole time I grew up there. Kids and adults would ask if you were born here and where your parents were from all the time. You’d see many elections where a much more qualified “outsider” would be defeated by the “good ol boy who had a sketchy political past because he was a Smuin or a Batty etc.”

But at the same time, I like Utah. Even though I haven’t lived there for 6 years, I like the state. I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to live there again, but I would. I prefer the east side of the state, but I’d even live in Utah County if given the chance. ;)

i’m from san diego… anything above los angeles is northern california, ha.

so, opposite problem than a lot of people. born and raised and lived in the same place till i got married. moved somewhere fantastic and lovely and awe-inspiring and started my marriage and had my oldest two kids there. we have since left and even though our families all still live in san diego, i feel “from” the state i used to live in. i moved a year and a half ago and STILL catch myself saying, “we recently moved from…”

we’re in los angeles now, not a desirable part, and there ain’t NO way i’m claiming this as home. interestingly, my husband was born here, moved to idaho when he was two or three, then moved to san diego when he was about ten and he says he’s from san diego. his adulthood has been spent in illinois, florida, south carolina, hawai’i, virginia and he still claims san diego, though he only lived there about eight years.

when I lived in the Bay Area (The SF one) almost everyone that asked where I was from would give the “I’m sorry you are from Utah”
Line. Now that I live in Oregon I am too embarrased to say that I lived in California. It was only six years, as opposed to the twenty-eight I spent in Utah.

I tend to get better reactions with ” I lived in California but I am from Utah”

My best Utah story….
At the time of the dedication of the Nauvoo Illinois Temple, I was working graveyard shift security. As people began to stream into town, it was common to see them pull up nearby in the middle of the night, just to look. One night, I was making my rounds when an elderly woman and her 40-ish daughter pulled up at the back side of the temple site. We conversed a bit, and I asked where they were from. “Utah,” they answered. I good naturedly said something about how I’d heard of that “vast desert wasteland out west.” The elderly woman was *completely* offended, and indignantly declared, “IT’S BLOSSOMED LIKE THE ROSE!!” The daughter and I exchanged glances, obviously both amused by the mother’s reaction.

That wasn’t the end of it, however. After a few moments, the daughter made a comment of breathtaking profundity: “Can you just imagine it? Part of OUR culture, OUT HERE!” I swear, it was all I could do not to say “Yeah, you know when they built the original, they had to drag it out here from Utah by oxcart!” ;-)