Latest update December 12th, 2024 1:00 AM
The nakedness of America revealed
“‘It feels like being hunted’: Latinos across the US in fear after El Paso massacre” (New York Times, August 6). Wild animals are subjected to those terrors, not men and women, and because of the colour of their skin and from where they come. But this is the dream, now a real nightmare for so many minorities. A certificate of naturalisation or an American birth certificate could also be passports towards an untimely death certificate.
As Guyanese line up on Duke Street (or less formal alleyways) in the hope of northbound passage, they should listen to a Hispanic pouring out his heartbreak: “Many clients tell me, ‘We’re the new Jews…’ Mr. Aguirre said. “It’s quite a transition…to being visible in a lethal way.” The horror is get used to it; it is now in the open, what was long incited in many nuanced fashions.
According to the August 6 article, “There are now about 56.5 million Latinos in the United States, accounting for 18 percent of the population — nearly one in five people in the country. That’s up from 14.8 million in 1980, or just 6.5 percent of the population, according to the Pew Research Center. Nearly two-thirds of Latinos were born in the United States.”
Doesn’t matter, that birthright and its inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence of the United States. Not for the non-white is the message.
It is because those numbers inspire fear and hate. The two are Siamese twins in the poisoned bloodline of accumulated racial anxieties and hatreds. The Caucasian majority is losing its numerical majority: lower birthrate, cosmopolitan lifestyle, the overwhelming tide of migrants, legal and illegal. In a country with a proud gun culture, and egged on by media, religious leaders, extremist political leaders, and far right militias and followers, that is an explosion waiting to happen. After all the rantings, it came to pass.
On the West Coast, in California, Kenia Peralta, 18, followed every news stream about the shooting. It led her to look at herself, at her Hispanic self, and as an American, and ask, “If this is what America is supposed to be, only white, then I guess I am not American,” said Ms. Peralta, whose parents emigrated from El Salvador. Those are the people coming, countless many of them to menace way of life.
To many like Ms. Peralta, the shooting brought home some scorching, piercing realities: this is not about some illegals looking over their shoulders. Rather, it is about the fear and fight for life itself. Another Hispanic completing a Ph.D. at Yale in American Studies, Ms. Cornejo Villavicencio was going out to an evening of dining, when El Paso made the news. “It’s really hard to be alive as an immigrant right now and to not be sick and exhausted,” she said. “It feels like being hunted.”
Factories full of immigrant labour – cheap, industrious, and ever so willing. And by the way, many times illegal: living in dread, identifying with discovery, succumbing to the stigma of deportation, and unraveling all the hard sacrifices made.
Few Guyanese ever talk frankly about those realities. There are thousands, likely tens of thousands of illegal Guyanese in that precarious boat. After all, those back track escapees and tourist disappearances are in mainly one place: Uncle Sam’s neighbourhood. Those long hours, hard times, fearful existences could be gone in the blink of an eye.
A less benevolent immigration regime; more hardcore officers manning the booths at JFK, the ugliness of jealous, spiteful family, friends, neighbours. For the Guyanese immigrant – whether illegal or legal and unlike the Hispanics – the anxieties are not about a bullet in the body, but of more prosaic concerns such as of acceptance, of belonging, of ever really being in a place that could be called home. This is the new immigrant reality. The nakedness of America shown at the bone.
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