I grew up on the US/Mexico border.
Before he married my mom, my dad was one of those illegals you heard about on the news. She once said he was goo-goo eyes for his green card.
I was a poor Mexican kid and in elementary school our game of ātagā was called āLa migraā and we pretended to run from immigration while laughing, removed from the reality of what it actually meant; as kids can be. I understood it as an adult.
My dad only spoke to us in English so we wouldnāt be picked on in school. And when he was in 3rd grade, my brother got sent to the āgiftedā school where his new teacher changed his name from Alfredo to Alfred. My mom sounded angry about it when she called the school. To me, it was practically the same name, just missing one letter. Just erasing one part of him.
I understood why she was mad as an adult.
We all had uncles or cousins who had been deported, some more than a few times. āI donāt know why sheās crying, he will be back in two weeks,ā my dad would roll his eyes and say, and sometimes they would come back. Sometimes they did not.
When you take long drives out in the country roads far away from the major highways sometimes you see bright blue barrels.
Water for people. Water for human beings like my dad who are making a terrifying and dangerous journey through a land filled with hate.
I wonder if the blue barrels are still there.
When they first got married, my parents road-tripped through the southern states, Alabama, Mississippi, the panhandle of Florida, and my mom told me stories of the hate and dirty looks she got from the white people who called her a race traitor ā who called my dad a wetback. All of it said out loud. All of it said with boastful brazenness. I would get a taste of it on school trips into certain counties of Texas. āThe kids from the border, those were the illegals. Those were the wetbacks. The fucking mojos.ā I heard it whispered to me from somewhere in a crowd of kids during a state level debate competition.
We pretended we didnāt hear it, but we all did. We talked about it quietly to each other on the bus ride back home.
This hate is not new. Itās a deep, old, vicious hate that has been around for decades. This isnāt something new to us.
To white folks, thoughā¦
Hmmā¦ would you look at that?
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