‘Canta y no Llores’ (Sing and Don’t Cry)
— From the Traditional Mexican Song “Cielito Lindo”
Mexican flags draped on houses, lotería at the Wheaton Public Library and Latino concerts at other librerías, colorful papel picado adorning the many Mexican restaurants in the area serving margaritas, taco plates and cervezas to laughing gringos with mariachi bands rehearsing for the big fiesta.
It’s Hispanic Heritage Month, amigo!
Like many of these “fiesta” holidays and celebrations that seem to go on with or without (working class) Latinos at least — Cinco de Mayo anyone? — as the celebration gains attention institutionally and symbolically, there is a sense of uncertainly and foreboding in the majority Mexican community privately. Juan is not one to be overly ecstatic this year.
It’s election time and like every four years during Hispanic Heritage Month, Latinos are lauded publicly and commercially but seemingly attacked at worst and ignored at best politically. For Latinos, Latinx but especially the vast local self-identifying Mexican community, threats made by Donald Trump to be “dictator for a day,” to carry out the “largest deportation operation in US history,” with claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of America” and so one appear to be aimed straight at us. They are emotionally affecting and enraging us, while the Democrats seem to have nothing to say about justice for the 11 million Latinos without immigration status, some of us here for 30 years or more.
With the backdrop of “Mass Deportation Now” and “Seal the Border” signage there were testimonies at the Republican National Convention by “everyday Americans” — i.e., non-Latinos — who seem to be united in scapegoating Latinos crossing some imaginary “open border” (that’s never been more militarized and monetized) for the following reasons: 1) Fentanyl overdoses (fentanyl does cross the border but mostly with US citizens bringing it over); 2) Violent crime (it takes a generation or two for immigrant families to reach homegrown crime levels nationally; 3) Uncontrolled immigration across the border (while the numbers have dropped dramatically in the past five months, a plurality of recent immigration by Latinos from states of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua sees refugees fleeing poverty in countries ridden by embargoes and cruel US sanctions.)
Meanwhile at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in the words of Newsweek, “Democrats showed a rightward shift on immigration.” Scarcely a word was uttered about a pathway to citizenship, executive order work permits or any other kind of pro-immigrant policy with a Kamala Harris presidency. Democrats chided Republicans for not “joining them” in a “border safety” bill that would see an even more militarized border leading to more border deaths, more migra ICE agents and the continuance of gutting of the human right to asylum.
The few carrots — a proposed increase in visas over the next five years would invariably benefit middle-class professionals from abroad who are not in desperate economic straights to seek refugee status abroad — were drowned in sticks and the sticking point: stay away from looking “soft” on immigration. That fear led to Obama deporting over 3 million during his presidency and inspiring Kamala Harris speaking in Central America in 2021 to say bluntly, “Do not come to the US.” Never has not wanting to look soft been so harsh.
But in my view, it has been this inaction on immigrant rights and leadership around immigrant justice that has led public opinion to recede from a pathway to citizenship, though the most recent poll shows a majority still approve. With Democratic cowardice and inaction on a pathway to citizenship for the majority of undocumented immigrants while continuing racist foreign policy in Latin America that goes back centuries and impacts not the government so much as the people, a xenophobic current fueled by right-wing media sensationalism has grown and filled the public space with lies and specious attacks on immigrants.
You have to be thick-skinned to be Mexican, facing long work days at low wages with 40% of Latino children living in poverty in the US while being at the brunt of income inequality disproportionately as a community making the 1% wealthiest Americans richer than ever — taking $50 trillion from the bottom 90% in the past few years. But in spite of these obstacles, as the Spanish saying goes, going out for wool and coming back sheared, Latinos contributed $3.2 trillion to the GDP in 2023, the last year recorded.
And how much more we can contribute with papeles! This Hispanic Heritage lets make it clear that we can’t truly celebrate the culture if we forget about the community.
Canta y no llores / Canta y don’t ignore us!
• Cristobal Cavazos, of Wheaton, is co-founder of Immigrant Solidarity DuPage, and an activist for the Latino community in Chicago's Western suburbs.