When I was a teenager, my Puerto Rican mother forbade me to cross the border into Mexico, my father’s country. “Mexico is nothing but trouble,” she said.
The border city of Tijuana, a short drive from our house in San Diego, was seeing a surge in cartel violence fueled by U.S. drug demand and U.S. firearms flowing illegally into Mexico despite that country’s strict gun laws. It was the early 2000s, and American newscasters framed it as a Mexican problem. After my parents split up, my mother sometimes did too. It was her way of grieving my father, who had started binge drinking and doing drugs, depressed and angry that she was out-earning him as a National Health Service Corps physician after he lost his job at a meatpacker. She wanted to draw a hard boundary severing me from everything he represented.
But I didn’t want to be ruptured. I wanted to be whole. For years, our family had driven south across the port of entry to eat seafood and explore. I missed those trips, which had ended when I was 6. So on weekends, I rode the trolley to the port of entry and walked through the rotating metal gates. There were no border guards for southbound travelers, so I crossed undetected. In Tijuana, I drank tequila, rode mechanical bulls and danced with strangers. I was 17, but nobody asked for my ID. At a house party, I met a cute local boy who offered me his bedroom because I was too intoxicated to find my way back to the border. We slept fully clothed and made chocolate chip pancakes in the morning. A part of me was seeking trouble, but I never found it.
During these clandestine trips, I was trying to form a fuller understanding of who I was. I don’t think I strongly identified as a “Latina.” I sometimes said I was “Hispanic,” the more common term then. But even that felt ill fitting, like a very small coat. More often I called myself “Mexican and Puerto Rican.”
I knew that Latinos were divided among themselves, too contradictory to be bound by a single label. My mother told me that when she was pregnant with me, my father’s cousins campaigned against his relationship with a “gringa.” (Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.) And whenever I misbehaved as a child, my Puerto Rican grandmother blamed the Mexican in me: “That’s her father’s blood coursing through her veins.”
I recall reading Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and filling the margins with hearts and exclamation points. His words elated me. “To be in any form, what is that?” he asked. He wrote that “I contain multitudes.” “I too am untranslatable,” he proclaimed. As a child of the border, I related. I knew many labels applied to me — girl, American, Hispanic, millennial, gringa — but I liked to think of myself as untranslatable, or too complex to be reduced to any of them.
Later, I moved to Mexico City for my first job as a journalist. The nuances and contradictions of my identity were never more obvious to me. I was a “foreign correspondent” in my father’s country. I was the only Latina in my newsroom. I was the beloved relative of my cousins in Ecatepec, a low-income barrio near Mexico City. They were the descendants of my great-uncle, who had been deported from the United States decades before.
While reporting on commodities, I saw Mexicans who identified as white or mestizo working with transnational corporations and cartels to exploit the resources and labor of their Indigenous and Afro-Latino countrymen. In the United States we’d all be “Latinos,” but a racial hierarchy existed south of the border, just as one existed north of it.
It wasn’t until I moved back to the United States to report on border issues in 2015, just before Donald Trump announced his first campaign by insulting Mexican people, that I began to identify strongly and simply as a Latina. I knew the term was associated with a reductionist view of who we were. But it gave me a sense of solidarity and safety in numbers. By linking arms with other writers and activists in the scapegoated group, I thought, we might stand a chance against the strongman. And we could protect our vulnerable loved ones from him and his movement.
But defining ourselves against Mr. Trump came at a cost. By extension it meant defining ourselves against all of his supporters, including our relatives. I became ruptured — what I’d been fighting all along. And I lost what I’d had as a child: the sense that I was untranslatable. The conviction that Latinos were as fathomless as Whitman. The demagogue had succeeded in dividing and conquering me.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he’d said after descending the golden escalator at Trump Tower. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
When I heard those words, I heard an attack against me — against people like my father. But in the group we call Latinos, countless people didn’t. Many who heard Mr. Trump’s words shared his sentiments about Mexicans. Even some Mexicans agreed, convinced that he wasn’t talking about them. They heard, “They’re not sending you.” They heard, “And some, I assume, are good people.”
Mr. Trump understood the differences among Latinos, and ahead of the 2024 elections, he further exploited them and drove us apart. His sophisticated on-the-ground operation stoked the flames of conflict among us: Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Central Americans, Chicanos and Evangélicos against one another and new immigrants. Online, he and his allies used the idea of a war on masculinity to pit men against their wives and ex-wives, sisters and mothers and daughters — and it hasn’t spared Latino men.
Among the Latino men seduced by this narrative was my father, who had marinated in YouTube during the pandemic lockdowns. Years before, he had emerged from a long era of drug benders to tell me riveting stories about his life. He seemed to have healed himself of his addictions. He was charismatic and articulate, with a gray beard, and had become obsessed with gardening and naturopathy. He visited me in Mexico City, where he went to the local markets and brought me plastic bags filled with dried herbs. I felt that I’d gotten my lost father back. I wrote a book about him that NPR described as a “love letter to her dad.” It was about how every label that I’d sought to apply to him (addict, schizophrenic, etc.) had disintegrated.
But later, as I reported on the consequences of Mr. Trump’s border shutdown in 2020, my father embraced Trumpism. When we spoke on the phone, he sought to enlighten me: I was the “fake news.” He knew that I’d just finished writing an investigative biography of Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior adviser at the time, and that I’d been reporting on Mr. Trump’s immigration policies for years. But he never asked me questions about any of it, and whenever I tried to share anything he would interrupt me to say that I was brainwashed. I’d grown up listening to him tell my mother, an M.D., that modern medicine was nonsense, using a dismissive expletive. When I began to set boundaries, telling him I loved him but that I wasn’t interested in lectures about my line of work, he seemed to lose interest in speaking with me.
This Christmas Eve, or Nochebuena, I ate dinner at my Mexican grandmother’s house, as I do every year. One of my cousins strode in wearing a MAGA cap. He fist-bumped my father and they stood outside, speaking with an air of secrecy and superiority. It occurred to me, for not the first time, that if I hadn’t pursued my father all these years, offering empathy and curiosity to his often unbelievable stories, we’d be estranged. Our relationship had always been one-sided. My role was to listen and learn; if ever I offered a thought, he became angry or dismissive. Since the moment I’d asked him to respect me, to hear me, our relationship had deteriorated.
During the Biden administration, I’d written repeatedly about the importance of seeking connection across political differences, of not giving up on our red-pilled relatives. But now I felt deflated. Was it really my responsibility to bridge the gap with my father as we rushed headlong into the administration of a man who has threatened journalists with jail time? Some of Mr. Trump’s most powerful allies have publicly ridiculed me and threatened legal action against me. Was it really I who had forsaken my MAGA relatives, or they who had forsaken me?
I left my grandmother’s Nochebuena celebration early. My head was spinning. I found myself replaying one of the few memories I had of my father showing up for me: When my car had broken down at night in Tijuana as I was reporting, I’d called him for help and he’d come, drunk-driving on his motorcycle, to fix my engine. Deep down, my father loved me — right?
I wanted so badly to find the words to unite us, and by extension all U.S. Latinos. But our unity had always been a fiction. In our desperation to be seen and heard, many of us had embraced a palatable theater of Latinidad. One that ignored our contradictions. One that pretended to be translatable. Even now, leading voices in our community are trying to fit Latinos into a box, such as by explaining our rightward shift by repeating tropes about our “family values.”
The Democratic Party’s failure was to speak to that fiction, our homogenous Latinidad, while treating us unequally. Even as its politicians and pundits claimed that Latinos are not a monolith, they turned us into an amorphous brown bloc: neither Black nor white, not really American either. A blur of Spanish-speaking, taco-eating clichés.
Perhaps now is the time for Latinos to reclaim the knowledge many of us grew up with and to insist on it: that Latinos are as contradictory and as uncategorizable as the Whitmans of this world. We, too, are untranslatable.
The answer is not for Democrats to treat Latino subgroups differently, as Mexicans versus Guatemalans versus Cubans versus Venezuelans. It’s to treat us all the same — the same as white people, the same as “real” Americans, the same as everybody who deserves to be recognized in their full and fathomless humanity.
If my father had felt like a valued member of the American family, he might not have succumbed to addiction in my childhood. And if Democrats had spoken to him first and foremost as a human, instead of as a caricature of a “Latino,” he might not have seen the appeal in being spoken to primarily as a man.
He had faced discrimination his entire life. Before he worked at a meatpacker, he built ships for nearly a decade, while restricted from certain areas of the shipyard — because he was a noncitizen he was perceived as a possible threat to national security. Shortly before my parents met in 1986, he was laid off. For a long time, he had dreamed of going to medical school. But he couldn’t afford it. And unlike my mother, he didn’t qualify for the loan program at the National Health Service Corps. It excludes noncitizens and non-U.S. nationals.
My father has long been skeptical of the government. For him, Mr. Trump’s appeal is that he performs rage against the machine. My father now qualifies for citizenship, but as far as I know, he hasn’t applied. So although he supports Mr. Trump, he has not voted for him. But he is representative of a number of Latinos — citizens, green card holders and undocumented ones — who feel dehumanized by this nation’s institutions and who want Mr. Trump to tear them down.
Latinidad, in its present iteration, can’t unite these men with their progressive daughters and mothers. It’s no match for the belonging offered by Mr. Trump and his movement, which takes their pain and anger seriously. And although, compared with other demographic groups, Latinas are paid the lowest of all wages and had higher pandemic unemployment rates than our brothers and fathers, women tend to have stronger social support systems than men do.
Today, the concept of Latinidad obscures the infinite distinctions that exist in our communities. Democrats have used it to paper over our differences and tell themselves they understand us. Republicans have used it to pit us against one another. It’s time for our politicians to see us as co-authors of the American story. Not as sidekicks or supporting characters. Not as pawns.
Democrats must devote themselves to a class agenda that guarantees equal rights for all, including housing, a quality education and fair wages. This is an agenda that can reach across the boundaries that divide us, both real and illusory, and create a sense of community that unites: a robust social safety net, an increased minimum wage, stronger labor rights and protections. For noncitizens, this class-based agenda means building institutions strong enough to support them, too. For the longtime undocumented population, this means prioritizing a pathway to citizenship, making them full members of America’s working class. They should not be treated like cheap labor for unscrupulous businesses, and Mr. Trump should not be allowed to use their second-class status to destroy solidarity among workers.
What of new arrivals at the border? Is the United States responsible for housing, educating and employing them, too? The answer is that we must not yield to pressures from the extremes of our political spectrum to treat them as homogenous. It has to be case by case. If we engage with new immigrants as real people and closely listen to the stories of why they left their homes, we might actually honor their dignity as individuals and reckon with the long-neglected root causes of immigration in which Americans are complicit, such as our own extractive industries.
Only by respecting immigrants can we decrease immigration and relieve the pressures that displace people from home. It’s a counterintuitive reality that may feel unnatural to those who’ve not grown up crossing borders. Similarly, it may sound like a paradox to argue that equitable treatment requires curiosity about each person’s individuality and distinct needs. But it’s common sense.
The term “Latino,” as it is now conceived, has fostered incuriosity about the multiverses that we contain. We all have to change how we think about Latinidad. For my part, I am not going to fall into the trap of making declarations about Latinos that hide our differences, of reducing us to easy summaries. I am no longer interested in treating our vastness like a voting bloc. I will not claim that Latinos are repelled by race-baiting. I will not assure Democrats that if they acknowledge our existence, we will vote for them.
But I don’t believe we should dispose of “Latino.” As a fronteriza — one born in the borderlands, where the lines are blurry — I reject either-or thinking. The history of oppression against Latinos is real, and abandoning the word might make it harder to remedy. Labels can be useful, however flawed. They can constrict us. But they can also set us free.
The word “Latino” echoes the Latin “latēns,” for hidden or secret. Perhaps we can salvage Latinidad as a tool for solidarity if we reimagine it as a place of refuge, or hiding, from the politics of division. Latinos include people who identify as white, Black, Indigenous, Asian and mixed. We have citizenship, green cards and no status. We vote in all kinds of inexplicable ways. What if we were to redefine Latinidad in terms of our latent multitudes? We could proclaim our inclusivity, a category against categories. As Whitman put it: “I resist any thing better than my own diversity.”
We could cross the border into that forbidden country — and find our way back to one another.
The post How I Crossed the Border Back to Myself appeared first on New York Times.
