"Too Many Hispanics"

“Takoma Park is not a very nice area. Too many Hispanics.”

This was what a community member said to my mom when I was in high school. We didn’t know him very well, so the fact that he felt comfortable enough to express this was revealing–but then, maybe he felt a sense of comradery in his and my mom's shared Indian nationality. And aside from the fact that he had just generalized and demeaned an entire ethnicity, there was something else that felt particularly distasteful about this statement: he had overlooked the fact that my dad is Dominican.

The “not very nice” area of Takoma Park that this man was referring to is in Montgomery County, Maryland. Maryland has a large immigrant population, with about one in every seven of our residents hailing from another country, and the highest percentage of our Hispanic residents living in Montgomery County. And as I later sat back and thought about this man’s comment, I could not help but think that it stemmed from a lack of comprehensive information in our media about Hispanic and Latino immigrants. This man had no meaningful connection with the people he was complaining about, little understanding of their circumstances, and likely no genuine interaction with them. If I were to guess, the majority of his information came from news sources and political opinions voiced online.

What I believe we often neglect when spotlighting immigrants is the latter part of their stories. It’s ordinary for us to see events of immigration at their conception, particularly for those of Hispanic and Latino heritage: we see images of the border crisis, of children being separated from their parents, and the brutal reality that they face when they arrive in the United States. We read about instances where I.C.E. bursts into people’s homes and sends them back across the border. Novels such as “Enrique’s Journey”¹ eloquently fixate on the conditions that immigrants from South and Central America face as they journey to America. But what happens after these immigrants successfully cross the border?

To be clear, I believe that the former topics are essential to highlight in our media. They underscore the barriers that we pose to outsiders as a nation, and they probe our conception of what it means to treat other humans with dignity. But what takes place once these immigrants have surpassed our border–once they are left to find housing, and jobs, and education, and to provide for their families?

What I wish that we emphasized more is this: the motivation that carries a person across valleys, seas, and deserts is not something that dies when they land on United States soil. It is not something that manifests in laziness, and a desire to remain financially stagnant, and to rely on governmental aid for a lifetime. Instead, it reflects a determination to surmount all odds in order to see a better future, often in ways that are excruciating to those who cross our borders.

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My dad grew up on the top floor of a small, two-story property in Haverstraw, New York. His father, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, worked two full-time jobs to provide for his family. Each morning, he arrived at the first job by 7:00 AM, worked until 4:00 PM, and had thirty minutes to eat dinner and rush out of the house again. He got home from his second job past midnight, slept for a few hours, and went back to work the next morning. This continued for over a decade.

When he was twelve years old, my dad would deliver newspapers in a nearby neighborhood early in the morning. This was in the dead of New York winter, where it was so cold that one morning his socks literally froze to his feet. He would return home shivering and stiff after hours of delivering the paper, sometimes without receiving full payment for his work. His dad was at work for most of the day, and his mother was at school pursuing her master’s degree, so he was often left at home with his sisters in the afternoons. “I learned how to make ramen when I was really young,” his sister said to us one evening. “It was delicious.”

One day, my dad’s parents got together enough money to buy a Commodore 64 Computer.  They would receive computer magazines full of ones and zeros at their house, and he sat at the computer copying pages of this by hand in order to code his first games. This was the first time that he realized he was interested in coding, and it sparked a long career in programming and computer security. My dad left home at thirteen for boarding school at Union Springs Academy, where he remained until moving to Maryland for college.

There were many aspects of his childhood that were not conventionally easy. His father worked relentlessly for years, his mom had to balance several children, her education, and her home life, and they both dealt with language barriers as they grew their fluency throughout this process. On top of this, the neighborhoods where they lived were not always safe–the drone of police sirens was a familiar sound to my dad throughout his childhood.

His siblings gained independence at a young age, the older ones immigrating from the Dominican Republic after living there for several years. And at the same time that life was often challenging and their living situation fragmented, they were held together by a common thread: two parents who worked tirelessly, against every obstacle, to provide for their children and create new opportunities. With this foundation, their children spread out into several different professions, moved into their own houses, and established their own careers.

Even now, as they’re scattered across the East coast, the importance of family is undeniable. I feel it every time I visit my aunt’s house in New York, where she cooks mountains of food for us and opens up her home at every opportunity. Or when I’m at home, and family comes into town, and we smash plantain and fry it to make tostones, and stay up talking late into the night. Or throughout my entire childhood, when my dad called his father every single day on his lunch break to stay connected with him. If there is one thing that has always underscored my Dominican family, it is a pervasive sense of love and connection to one’s family.

My grandfather passed away in 2011, and a tree stands in my aunt’s yard in his memory.

“In loving memory of Papi,” it says,
“El corazón alegre constituye buen remedio, más el espíritu triste seca los huesos” (Prov. 17:22)
A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.

I cannot think of anything that better captures his spirit–or that of my entire immigrant family–than an unshakable optimism in the face of hardship.

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I wish that we didn’t generalize the experience of Hispanic and Latino immigrants to the extent that we do, but I believe the more we tell their individual stories, the more this changes. And, in response to the claim that an area is bad because it has “too many Hispanics,” I quote Mohamad Safa:

“I’d rather live next door to someone who crossed the oceans with a child to escape death and violence than a citizen who wouldn’t cross the street to help a foreigner.”

While this may not perfectly capture the situation of every immigrant, the point still stands: this attitude is what makes a rich and meaningful community–and personally, the only type of community that I would like to live in.
 

1. While “Enrique’s Journey” does contain an epilogue that details Enrique’s life after he successfully makes it to the United States, the majority of the book focuses on his journey.