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January 2 - January 13, 2021
Now I could see a ten-year-old girl who is used to smiling at people, because wherever you live in Honduras or El Salvador or Guatemala, I imagine, is a small town and everyone there knows one another. And there, even though it might be one of the most dangerous places in the world, people still smile at each other.
Always smiling
I realized then that this was my chance to speak to one of the children who we have been told over and over again present a secret threat to our country.
Berta walked up slowly to the immigration agent standing behind a lectern and handed him our five green cards. She knew these cards were more valuable than the temporary visas she had stamped in her Mexican passport. These little pieces of plastic gave Berta legitimacy in her new country.
“Ma’am, your baby looks like she has German measles,” he said in a thick Texas accent. “Which is contagious, so we are going to have to put her in quarantine. The rest of you are okay to come in with your green cards. But the little baby, we are going to have to put her in quarantine and keep her.”
It had to have been a mistake. That’s what I told myself my whole life. But I was wrong. In fact, there was a room for babies like me, and I would discover that as I was writing this book. It wasn’t just a room. It was an entire system decades in the making.
My adopted country, the United States of America, was founded by immigrants who had no papers or permission to come but who were seeking a new beginning with boundless potential.
In fact, the first colonial settlements in the territory we now consider the United States were not in Jamestown or Plymouth Colony. The Spanish, led by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, arrived at St. Augustine in what is now Florida in 1565;
History is written by the victors, which means we should question the version of history that has been handed down to us—by teach-ers, the media, and authority figures.
When the US won the Mexican-American War in 1848, Mexico was forced to cede nearly half of its territory—land that later made up California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming—for $15 million as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The people living there did not cross any border or migrate anywhere. Instead, the border crossed them, forcing US citizenship on them overnight with the promise they could keep the land they owned.
Those words and sentiments on racial superiority helped pave the way for Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the US. But it was Asian women who were the first people ever legally excluded from this country with the Page Act of 1875, which prohibited women from China, Japan, or other Asian countries from landing on these shores. The white man’s version of history says they needed to be kept out because they would come only to work as prostitutes, but isn’t it more plausible that they were just like my mom, coming to a new country
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which is why we are always having a conversation about “good” immigrants versus “bad” immigrants. When immigrants are convenient and beneficial to our economy or political agenda, we use the words hardworking, deserving, courageous, and freedom-loving. When our economy dips and jobs are suddenly scarce or we hear too many people speaking languages other than English on the street and “our way of life” seems threatened by “the other,” immigrants become menacing, criminal, contaminated, and a drain on society.
Mom and Dad were the first in their families to leave Mexico, and were learning about the world together. It always frustrated my father that in order to be respected and given the resources he needed to continue his research he had to leave his homeland. It bothered him deeply that he felt like his own country didn’t love him as much as other places.
The United States was willing to bring the best to their country from anywhere. Emma Lazarus was speaking to the masses, but this was not about the tired and weary being invited to safety. This was a country hungry and betting on the future, and another country, Mexico, acting like modernity and competing with the rest of the world didn’t matter.
Instead of just being on a journey to make his scientific research dreams come true, he realized he might also be on a journey of erasing who he was in order to assimilate to the norms of this strange
country.
Things made sense at school because even though there was no one else who looked like me there, my classmates came from diverse backgrounds and that made me, for some reason, feel safe. There were black and white kids along with a girl whose last name was Takeuchi and a boy named Tahir.
Diverse backgrounds made her feel safe. What about us?
When he won his first governorship in 1962, he famously declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
George Wallace
Only a man filled with hatred could do this to people simply because they were different from him.
Of course, Mom and Dad had no idea I had a secret plan to keep my family safe. I had to take care of them because I was the one who understood this place. A place I needed to learn to protect myself from.
A place she needed to protect herself from.
Anti-immigrant feeling was and has been a naturally occurring, cyclical phenomenon in this country. It’s not a Republican or Democrat thing; it’s an American thing (until we decide it’s not).
During the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover announced a national program called “American jobs for real Americans.” Local laws were passed that prohibited companies from employing people of Mexican descent, even citizens; Mexican Americans and immigrants who did not have the proper documentation were detained and deported; public raids amplified the message to motivate others to leave of their own accord.3
In 1942, the Bracero Program was launched, recruiting millions of Mexican “guest workers” to do low-paying, backbreaking agricultural jobs.4 The good immigrant/bad immigrant narrative comes and goes with the tide.
La mayoría de norteamericanos estaba luchando en la Segunda Guerra Mundial
Everyone back in Mexico teased Dad for becoming an American citizen. They said he had turned his back on his country, a vendepatrias—literally, a man who sells his country. They called him a gringo and a gabacho.
Selling your own country
When Mom two-stepped in, the butchers, cashiers, and clerks addressed her as usted, and while I didn’t understand it, I liked it. They called her Señora Berta and welcomed her in a singsong Spanish that I struggled to keep up with. The flirting was low-key, but even as a child, I caught the smiles, the winks. Mom grinned back, her eyes made up perfectly with her jet-black Maybelline pencil.
People from all over the world were a part of my American life on the South Side of Chicago,
Diversity
In fact, the idea of “Hispanic”—a people united by their Spanish-speaking heritage—was not conceived of until the mid-1970s, when the National Council of La Raza and others began lobbying the Census Bureau to create a category that would more accurately account for people from Latin America. The 1980 census was the first to include the term Hispanic, with options to check off further subcategories such as Mexican, Mexican American,
Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and others.
Women there also maintained a formidable feminine power. It was in Mexico, not Chicago, where I saw women delivering the news on TV for the first time. I also heard their smooth voices on Radio Educación reading the headlines or sitting in the anchor chair on the educational television channel known as Canal Once. I got another message: Mexican women are public thinkers, change makers, beings who are not afraid to be visible and take up space.
La Malinche was an Aztec
woman born to a noble family, but later sold into slavery (trafficked), where she ultimately “served” the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés.2 She grew to be one of Cortés’s most trusted advisers; her ability to translate indigenous languages and brilliance as a political strategist became indispensable. La Malinche famously saved Cortés by informing him of Aztec plans to destroy his army, helping clinch his victory in the Spanish-Aztec war of 1519 to 1521. Her detractors accused her of betraying her own people and helping the white man to slaughter them; more scandalous was the fact that she
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La malinche
These Mexican heroines, journalists, and soldiers were also my first role models.
Role models
I would show my cousins, who I knew looked down on me for being a gringa,
It was in high school that my imposter syndrome first bloomed. Each morning, fully dressed, my mod neck scarf tied just so, my tight bell-bottom jeans hugging my behind, I would sit down and eat a bowl of Cap’n Crunch cereal. Five minutes later, my nerves would take over and attack my stomach. Without anyone realizing that I was having a panic attack, least of all myself, I would quietly go to the bathroom and throw up several times before reemerging.
Imposter Syndrome
I never thought I was good enough to work there. That job was for American men, the little voice inside me said.
How else can we otherize people from different places?
This was a sign! She didn’t understand my excitement, but to me, her entrance into my life affirmed that I was on the right path to figuring out my Mexican and Latin American identity. And I’d finally have a chance to work on my Spanish.
A sign
Privilege means responsibility.
When we are role models.
we’ve always had a love-hate relationship when it comes to refugees. The US government is selective and strategic about deciding who is allowed to come in, granting asylum when it is politically advantageous, as it had been during the Cold War against communist governments like Fidel Castro’s.
Refugees
Their protest demanded that Reagan’s administration recognize the Central Americans fleeing violence as refugees, end military aid to the region, and help negotiate a peaceful resolution to the conflict (sound familiar?).
It also redefined the term refugee based on UN conventions as an individual with a “well-founded fear of persecution.”
What it means to be a refugee
In Bolivia, miners were seen as the scum of the earth because most of them were indigenous. So imagine how the wives of the miners were looked upon. They were the least powerful in the food chain, which meant they had nothing to lose.
The lesson here was that the most powerless people can sometimes be the ones who first motivate everyone else to join together for a cause. They start by believing in the power of their own voices.
Our collective space was part of my attempt to foster an environment where I could embrace the woman I had become: Pan–Latin American, feminist, artist, political activist, radio show host, influencer, community creator, intellectual but also anti-intellectual, with a growing spiritual exploration into Santeria.
What Hinojosa had become
I wrote about the trauma of war and relocation to “the best country in the world,” but it was the US intervention in their countries that made them end up here in the first place.
Why are they here
An intellectual academic or professor? That’s exactly what I did not want to do. I wanted to be with the people, on the ground, not in an ivory tower.
This can be true 😞
If it hadn’t been for a lady named Jane in the internship office, who believed in me more than I believed in myself, I wouldn’t be here. I was living in DC for free for a month and starting an internship at NPR tomorrow!
I had become an expert at being the other.
I convinced myself that if I had gotten on the air with two spots during my internship then I was smart enough to be able to pitch and file an entire piece. I decided to stop shooting myself down and instead start talking myself up.
Asshole, I said to myself about myself. Te lo creíste. You told yourself you were good enough. You weren’t. This was supposed to be my big break. I was crushed. All of those times that I forced myself to believe I could do it, talking myself up, puffing out my ego, were a waste of time. I was never going to make it as a journalist.
Of course there were more people like me out there, but Jay’s comment, though to me clueless, was also a result of people like me being invisible, for the entirety of my life. Young, hungry, smart, and sophisticated Latinas were everywhere except for in the news media.
