No Place for Hate
If you were to ask me who I am, the answer would be convoluted. If there is one thing about myself I can be proud of, it’s that I am Hispanic, and my Hispanic heritage is a central part of my identity. From the food I eat, the music I listen to the languages I speak, and the norms and traditions I hold near and dear to my heart, being Hispanic makes me who I am.
My mother and father came to the United States in the early 2000s, with few prospects and speaking only Spanish. Spanish was my first language, and when I started school I was greeted with a language barrier that made communicating with others difficult. However, the first thing I learned to understand was when someone was making fun of me for not speaking English and calling me names. As I grew up, I mastered English, but that still didn’t fully protect me from the hateful comments I would hear directed at myself and my community. I was reminded of how different I was when I heard about how a coworker made fun of my mom’s accent at work. Or when someone told my parents, aunts, and uncles to “go back to their country,” or when I scrolled through social media reading about when politicians labeled us as no-good drug dealers, gang members, or rapists.
The Hispanic community, like many other communities, is no stranger to bigotry, racism, colorism, and xenophobia. But this makes the blatant and perpetual hate we inflict on others in our community and others outside of our community all the more disgusting. The comments that three Los Angeles Council members Nury Martinez, Gil Cedillo, and Kevin de León, as well as Labor Federation Chief Ron Herrera, had made towards indigenous Latinx people and black people were a slap in the face to the Hispanic community at large. And even though they were exposed and are facing the consequences of their actions, it is important to remember that these vile comments did not happen in a vacuum. These comments are a result of a larger problem. Racism and colorism are nothing new within the Hispanic community, remnants of a cruel past of colonization. But they have unfortunately remained strong ever since, from the unconscious hate we direct towards ourselves and others, to the blatantly explicit bigoted comments I hear leave the mouths of Hispanic people all too often.
When I got the notification of the news on my phone, I was briefly brought back to a small house-like structure on a playground I frequented in preschool. As I climbed the brightly colored slide, a group of fair-skinned girls stood at the very top and spoke to me. I did not understand most of what they were saying, but the only Hispanic girl said something to me I never forgot — she called me a “changuita,” which I understood to mean monkey girl in Spanish. And 14 years later, I was hearing that same word come out of the mouth of one of our elected representatives, an official that represents so many people of color. If we want to ensure that we are welcoming and inclusive to all communities, we need to call out the bigotry and hateful rhetoric that is not just directed toward us, but that which we hear directly toward others from within our communities.