Change

It comes with utter dismay and disappointment that a man known to be so prejudiced against the existence and nature of the minorities in this country would win re-election partially because of the help of the Mexican-Americans spread across the country. More shocking is the fact that counties harboring large numbers of both legal and illegal Mexican migrants became red counties including my home county: Orange County. It sickens me to think that my own people don’t stand behind me. Of course, I am incredibly grateful for the ones that do. I understand how important it is to have allyship during these hard times, and I know how lucky I am to reside in California, a place to until now has been a safe haven and a relative place of luxury compared to the places in which people like me end up. I am not as afraid of what the future holds as I was when I was much younger, because I am seasoned illegal now.

Being undocumented paired with resilience and a willingness to succeed can become a sort of art that one exploits to internally elevate oneself to a place that most document people remain reluctant to reach. All you need to do, to people like me, is remove the external structures that bound me, and in that way, I will be able to demonstrate the glowing diamond have become. I think about all immigrants this way; glowing, dazzling diamonds forged by years of oppression and molded by the external forces that have defined our entire lives. “Go back to Mexico.” That phrase echoes through my mind when I hear Trumpist rhetoric spewed uncontrollably and with unbelievable negligence of what was. He came down his golden escalator to tell us that the people coming through the border are bringing drugs, crime, and rape, along with mentioning the presumably good people that Trump reluctantly chose to include in the case that he might be taking his comments a little too far.

I remember when the use of such words was polarizing. They would incite fear, they would incite anger, but most interestingly, they’d incite little action. We would go back to work, keeping putting our heads down like we’ve done our whole lives. Some Mexicans stopped going to Mexican grocery stores. Some even stopped going outside unnecessarily. We were all panicked, but none of us did anything to fight this. I did not see the outrage reflected in protests or in writing. I did not see a Mexican excellence movement in which groups of Mexican intellectuals united in a common cause to push back against these incredibly ignorant ideas. We did not demand change in the way that I believe our ancestors would have, had they known that the evasive nature of racism would transcend generational barriers, and perhaps even ethnic ones.

I digress. I think there comes a point in oppression where part of surviving it, becomes accepting it. Some of the most privileged Mexicans began making jokes, and light-hearted fun our what they observed would scare their families so much. Eventually, we did survive. In his ineptitude, it quickly became clear that he was in no position to enact any meaningful change in the immigration system. If he had, he would have dealt with the catastrophic economic effects that mass deportation would have ensued, or he would have been forced to implement real immigration reform which would have helped our community, and confused a lot of Republicans. In any case, Trump was not the man for the job, and when Biden won we became unburdened by the fear of being wrong about that statement. The four years we had to relax were the four years we had to forget, and when the next election came around, there were enough indoctrinated Mexican American Trumpists to get the job done. It seems simple. If you allow the country to become overly concerned with the economy, you can then focus on peddling propositions to fix the economy, and the word ‘economy’ carries no exclusions. Waiters and construction workers are part of the economy. So are people who have virtually never worked a day in their life. Everyone benefits when the money is good, and nobody really knows how the economic machine really works so a few fancy words and appealing promises are all it takes to turn someone against their own people.

People want real change, not for the elusive ‘other,’ but for themselves. I’ve been thinking about what real change looks like, and whether it’ll ever be achievable. As much as it pains me to admit it, I can understand how some people can believe that real change becomes abandoning the existing self, and those who surround it. People begin to attribute being poor to being Mexican or being poor with continuing the ‘Mexican ways,’ which are too often attributed to the literal and progressive nature of the reformational policies that our ancestors yearned for generations as they were and still are, those that would benefit our people the most. They can separate themselves from the rest of us, and so they do. In their eyes, it is republican vs. liberal, and if Mexicans can earn the privilege of becoming republican then all perceived demonization towards them is rendered void or deflected onto other people. In other words: if you become a part of the monster, then the monster can’t eat you. The catch is you become the monster, and monsters have to eat.

To continue and eventually end this essay, I want to make it clear that I am aware that immigration reform stands perpindecularly against the machine that is this country; allowing people who are already here to have rights that they deserve will incentivize people from other countries to come because it will give people hope that they can also perhaps take part in such perceived equality. This line of reasoning makes sense, but it’s also troubling; if rights are taken away or withheld from people for the sake of perception, it compromises crucial implications of what laws stand for to begin with. Laws are supposed to serve the people affected by them, and should never be used as a means of deterrent or, in a more accurate sense, for the sake of terrorizing others. My people are scared to come into this country.

My people are scared of being in this country. And my people are definitely scared to leave this country. There are many dimensions to the uncertainty felt by our Mexican American brothers and sisters, and to the illegal migrants that are desperately searching for a voice to represent them. We are in the midst of an ideological change, rooted in the fear of the improbability of a legal one. I am completely distraught by the periphery of what I can only deem as my future, but I am also hopeful in the sense that I too have a say in the attitude we can continue to have, inevitably forming part of the Mexican, Latino, minority, and underdog communities in this country. Change is inevitable, but change is turbulent and uncertain, and in this way, we must be aggressive in our efforts to dominate and shape it to fit our needs; in many ways, that is the very basis for progress and the antithesis of regression.