America. The great melting pot. Or salad bowl, or whatever metaphor is being tossed around nowadays. Sure, there had been some problems with issues of race and equality, but we got that out of our collective system decades ago and now there’s nothing to look forward to but a happy, diverse future.
At least, that’s what I was taught growing up in affluent suburbia. We all know that this isn’t true, of course. For a variety of reasons, race and ethnicity have continued to loom large over our cultural and political landscape. It’s one thing to understand this on an intellectual level, however, and another to actually believe it.
That’s why this election season and the coming of The Great Immigration Debate has been incredibly shocking, both to me and the people closest to me. It wasn’t the marches. Sure, my mom cried while watching the rallies on television, but I felt some sympathy, a vague sense of kinship as a fellow immigrant (though I was far too young to remember much other than being a Californian).
It was the powerful anti-immigration backlash that followed that shocked my family. Despite occasional blips, we have never felt anything other than completely welcome in this nation in nearly two decades of life here. Suddenly, I heard people on TV talking about how we must “stop the invasion” and how Hispanics are out to destroy apple pie and baseball. There are many sane and practical reasons to oppose illegal immigration, but the tenor of the debate has quickly become, “We must save our civilization from The Scary Others.” There is only one word that can adequately describe this guttural reaction: racism.
Spending your days ensconced in everyday Georgetown life, it’s hard to understand just how momentous this backlash has been for the entire Hispanic and immigrant communities in this country. On campus, it’s just another aspect of politics. On Spanish-language television, radio and print news this has been the defining topic of the year, with every Congressional debate or anti-immigrant proposal getting an avalanche of coverage. Even here, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Hoya who knows of Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), but for many in the Hispanic community, he’s a household name synonymous with his draconian bill that would deny basic quality of life to millions upon millions of people who have lived in the United States for years.
I don’t defend illegal immigration, but demonizing and attempting to uproot tens of millions is neither practical nor moral. Beyond the politics, however, there are many like myself who have come from “out there” or have loved ones who do. We are the ones who now have to deal with the fact that racism is not an antiquated thought hiding in the recesses of backwards America, as we’d like to imagine, but still alive and kicking. At us.
