Five years ago, before Latino people worried much about Donald Trump, Oscar Saldivar stood in my living room in Los Angeles and told me a story. He began to weep.
Saldivar is a building contractor and a Mexican immigrant. I had hired his construction company to add a room to my home. We’re both fluent Spanish speakers with roots in Latin America, and we were chatting in that language about his life and mine. He told me he had recently visited a hardware store in the San Fernando Valley where immigrant day laborers seek work, and had come upon a group of right-wing activists protesting their presence. He took personal offense at hearing these “idiotas” call his immigrant brothers and sisters “criminals.” So he took a big wad of cash from his wallet and showed it to them. “I was an illegal,” he told the protesters. “And now I make more money than any of you.”
He was eighteen when he arrived in Los Angeles. “I was homeless,” he told me. “I’d walk down the street and find cars with open doors and sleep inside them.” He worked as a dishwasher, and then as a gardener, and eventually legalized his status, but the memory of those helpless first days in the United States was never far away. “I was all alone,” he said. As he told me the story, anger and hurt welled up inside him. He was no longer a burly father of five, with one kid in college and another in the U.S. Marines, the owner of a big suburban L.A. home. Instead, he was that skinny teen-ager looking for shelter. “These people who hate us—they have no idea what we’ve been through,” he said.
Right-wing talk-show hosts, pundits, and protesters have been provoking these feelings in Latino people for decades. Now one of their ilk is President. There are said to be eleven million undocumented people in the United States, the vast majority of them from Mexico and Central America. Many millions more Latinos are legal residents and citizens who are not far removed from a border-crossing story. It’s their own memory, or that of a parent, sibling, spouse, in-law, or grandparent. They know the crazy, cruel things that can happen to you when you take a long walk across the desert, or when you trust your fate to demented smugglers. Or the sense of inferiority that never leaves you after you’ve been hungry in an American city. Or the petty indignities of being an outsider in a white-ruled town that sees you as a brown untouchable whose job is, literally, cleaning the shit off the toilets.
Donald Trump rubbed our faces in these memories during his Presidential campaign. Now his prejudices and those of the movement that brought him to power are government policy. Last month, his Administration issued a directive that raised the spectre of mass deportations across the Spanish-speaking United States for the first time since the Great Depression, when approximately a million people were forcibly repatriated to Mexico. Trump has granted new powers to immigration officials, sped up deportation hearings, and expanded the criteria for expedited removal. It’s a policy built on the idea that working people from Latin America are a threat to “national security” and somehow responsible for economic and social decline. You can be a very successful person of Mexican heritage and still feel the sting of this insult.
The other day, I sat with the novelist and essayist Valeria Luiselli in Los Angeles’s Grand Central Market. Luiselli is a Mexican citizen who works as a professor at Hofstra. “There are small but very profound layers of humiliation attached to a nationality that’s assumed to be criminal and inferior,” she told me. In 2015, I watched Luiselli address a Los Angeles auditorium in the aftermath of one such humiliation. As she rose to a podium to accept the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction, she announced to the few hundred people present that she had just been detained by immigration agents. She’d written her acceptance speech during the five hours she had spent locked in a room in Los Angeles International Airport with the other unfortunate souls who had been stopped for “secondary inspection.” “I saw how abusive these officers were to older women who were held there, and who couldn’t speak English and defend themselves,” Luiselli said.
Luiselli volunteered for a year as a court translator for unaccompanied Central American minors detained while trying to enter the United States. Last year, the Border Patrol captured nearly sixty thousand such children. In “Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions,” a book based on her courtroom interviews, she writes of girls and women raped by smugglers, and of the harsh conditions inside the U.S. detention facilities, known as the “icebox.” She says that a small measure of justice for these children can come from “hearing and recording those stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt and shame us.” Luiselli is now a permanent U.S. resident, and she and her husband are raising their daughter, Maia, in Harlem. In the wake of Trump’s immigration orders, Maia, who is seven, suggested that maybe it was better not to speak Spanish outside. “This is in New York City,” Luiselli told me. “It makes me wonder how children in much less diverse cities, or in marginalized situations, are living this moment.”
I saw the movement that created this fear being born in California in the early nineties. Nativist activists put forward a voter initiative that would have banned undocumented immigrants from public schools and hospitals; Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s successful reëlection campaign broadcast images of immigrants swarming over the U.S. border. I naïvely thought American xenophobia would begin to fade when the “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush was elected and immigration reform seemed on the horizon, and again with the election of Barack Obama and the bipartisan proposals of the “Gang of Eight” senators. The failure to enact those reforms has left millions of Latino immigrants as a de-facto caste of service and farm workers, with new G.O.P.-authored state and federal laws and actions pushing them further to the margins of civil society. The United States is home to more and more people who are native English speakers and who feel fully American—but who don’t qualify for driver’s licenses or in-state college tuition. They live with the daily knowledge that one mistake can lead them to be deported to countries they’ve never really called home.
The United States has created such castes before. In 1903, about halfway through the long purgatory between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act, W. E. B. Du Bois published “The Souls of Black Folk,” his treatise on African-American identity in an age of officially sanctioned inequality. Black people were trapped between their sense of themselves as human beings with a proud culture and the racist laws and movements that meant to keep them living in fear and submission. Much has changed in the century since, and much has not. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity,” Du Bois wrote. The Latino community in the U.S. owes many debts to its African-American brothers and sisters, but none is greater or more relevant now than the example of black resistance.
Today, Trumpism hangs over all things Latino. We seek to be, as Du Bois wrote of African-Americans, “a co-worker in the kingdom of culture.” But whether we like it or not, the accomplishments of our valedictorians, our mayors, and our veterans are weighed against the crimes that Donald Trump and Bill O’Reilly attribute to our “alien” fathers and sons. The more fortunate among us feel the responsibility of placing our art and our intellectual creations at the service of resistance. Our activists work with a renewed sense of urgency, angered by stories like that of the thirteen-year-old girl who shot a video of immigration agents detaining her father. In Los Angeles, the nation’s largest Latino-plurality city, we watch our children going to school on the morning streets, carrying violin cases and backpacks, and we wonder about the country they will inherit from us.
The entire United States is now following the path of Arizona, where lawmakers have crafted many of the country’s the most aggressive anti-immigrant measures, including S.B. 1070, a law, from 2010, that gave local police new powers to track down and detain the undocumented. But Arizona has also produced some of the Latino community’s most tenacious defenders. Among them is Petra Falcon, a fourth-generation Mexican-American whose struggles have stretched across decades, from Phoenix City Hall meetings against gun violence in the eighties, to months of vigils against the 2010 law. Falcon worked on a successful 2011 recall effort against the bill’s author, State Senator Russell Pearce. “We survived through S.B. 1070 by fighting back,” she said. And in November, Falcon and other Latino activists helped to defeat Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who established “saturation” patrols in Phoenix’s immigrant neighborhoods. About Trump’s immigration actions, she said, “We’ve been through this before. Sheriff Arpaio terrorized people so they couldn’t go outside, step out their front door, or go to the doctor or the store.” Now many Phoenix residents are not driving again, lest some traffic violation give the federal government grounds to deport them.
Jose Barboza has been driving to work in fast-food restaurants, even though he risks being returned to a country he hasn’t seen since he was four years old. “I have to drive to work,” he told me. “I’m working from ten until nine at night—very long hours. Gotta support myself somehow.” Barboza is twenty-five and a fluent English speaker. To all who meet him, he’s just an average Mexican-American dude, with a head of thick, close-cropped hair and a geeky-goofy streak. As a part-time activist with Falcon’s group, Promise Arizona, he’s registered more than two thousand people to vote, even though he can’t vote himself. Barboza expected to apply for deferred action against deportation, or DACA, after a Hillary Clinton victory. When she lost, “We were in mourning, as if a family member were to die,” he told me.
Four months later, however, “I’m good and I’m living,” Barboza said. He considers himself as American as the multitudes he’s registered to vote. So he’ll stay in the U.S., even though he might be deported for daring to deliver a pizza. “I want to become a citizen,” he said. His grandfather brought him from Guadalajara to Arizona to work and study hard. He’s come to believe he can make the U.S. a better country for those Latino kids who walk to school on the wide, desert streets of Phoenix, as he once did. Despite the election and Trump’s executive orders, he still sees that same hopeful person staring back at him when he looks in the mirror.