New York Times (Opinion)
By Héctor Tobar
March 9, 2016
In this great season of seething American rage, showmen and rabble-rousers have the floor.
Round up the field hands and the busboys and deport them southward, they say. “Build a wall!” they chant at rallies
and basketball games. Dip bullets in pigs’ blood for our Muslim enemies.
By comparison, we Latino citizens of the United States suffer from a rage deficit.
Consider
our victimized brothers and sisters, the handcuffed and hunted of
Mesoamerica: the Oaxacans and the
Guatemalans, and the Hondurans and the many others who cross the sands
of the Sonoran Desert to reach the Promised Land. They die in hundreds
every year.
When was the last time we annoyed you with our outrage about their preventable deaths? The last time one of our
leaders unleashed a viral television rant about the failure to enact immigration reform?
Our cries of protest and complaint might as well be whispers. And yet … I figured two recent pieces of news might
finally raise the volume of Latino anger.
The
first was a plan by the Obama administration to conduct raids against
hundreds of immigrants who are among
the recent wave of refugees from Central American violence. The second
was the scandalous treatment of some of those refugees, including minors
who were released into the custody of sex traffickers.
How could this happen? Do we count for so little?
Last
century, I was a student who marched and chanted the slogans of the
day: “U.S. out of El Salvador!” “Free
Nelson Mandela!” Maybe what we need now is a hashtag that summarizes
our sense of worth and how we’ve been wronged. Say, #brownlivesmatter.
I
went to the campus of California State University, Los Angeles, where
the student body is more than half Latino,
to try out my idea. Think of the undocumented roundups, I told the
students I met. Think of our second-class status, even in Los Angeles,
where “Mexican” and “Guatemalan” are often synonymous with laborer.
“Isn’t it time for a ‘Brown Lives Matter’ movement?”
I asked.
Almost all the Latino students objected on the ground of cultural appropriation. Black people have suffered enough,
they said. Let’s not take their slogan, too.
There’s nothing in American history as bad as slavery, a criminal justice major told me. No argument there.
And a graphic-design major pointed out, “Well, you know, a lot of Latino people can pass for white.”
“True,” I conceded. “Like Marco Rubio.”
Sure,
these students were angry about the marginalized status of people of
Mexican and Central American descent
in the United States. One Latina told me how much she resented the
“othering” she encountered because of her appearance and Spanish
surname: “People ask me all the time, ‘Where are you from?’ And they
don’t mean, ‘Are you from the Valley or Long Beach?’ ”
Yet, she didn’t see the need to make a stink about it, why embarrass herself by getting angry just because of
some idiot?
Herein lies the reason for our anger deficit: We hear the voice of our mothers saying, “Mijos, you only demean
yourself if you lash back at an insult.”
Please don’t confuse this forbearance with passivity. And don’t call Latinos the “sleeping giant” of American
civic life. (That cliché will make me scream.)
The
Latino students I met resist oppression in a low-key, goal-oriented
way. By working full time while getting
a degree. By studying to become breadwinners who give back to their
communities. And by voting for a candidate likely to support immigration
reform.
Only
a handful, right now, feel the need to take to the streets, like the
group arrested after blocking downtown
traffic in a protest against deportations — a brave action that was
barely a blip on the nation’s radar. One young woman at Cal State told
me she felt guilty for not going, given that her own mother is still
trying to sort out her immigration papers after
more than two decades in the United States.
That’s all right, I told her. Getting good grades is also a way of resisting racism — though studiousness alone
may not get us to the Promised Land.
For
that, we’d need an eloquent voice of leadership (think Barack
Obama,Philadelphia, 2008). Or a book that changes
the national conversation, as “The Grapes of Wrath” or “The Jungle”
did. Another half-million people protesting on the streets (as we did
here in 2006) wouldn’t hurt.
Until
then, I’ll supply my rage needs by following a group of writers and
comedians known as the Latino Rebels
who tweeted sarcastically about how endorsements from anti-immigrant
figures like the controversial Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio would help
Donald J. Trump “do really well with ‘the Hispanics.’”
A mere squeak amid the cacophony of American fury, but it’s a start.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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