You M’am, are not my Abuela!

Being a Latino in the United States myself it has definitely been interesting to see how my thinking on the subject has evolved over the course of researching this topic. I feel that as a person of color I have been oppressed in our society but in such a way that I never really noticed, until recently that is. As a child I never really felt different from any of my classmates, mostly due to the fact that I was fortunate enough to grow up in a very diverse neighborhood. I don’t recall ever feeling like I didn’t belong or that I was less than my white classmates, because I felt that we were all treated equally. It wasn’t until recently that I discovered that society teaches us racist ideologies that halt the socioeconomic and political growth of Latino’s in the U.S. in the most subliminal ways.
 Personally I always felt like I identified with my heritage because that is what I was raised with. Despite this I’ve never been fond of identifying myself as a Latino, or Chicano, but instead as the whiter washed term “Hispanic”. I do not remember any specific instances in which I felt blatantly discriminated against when using identifying words such as Latino or Chicano, but for some reason I still knew that in a sense, it was looked down upon to be seen as Latino in this country. Subconsciously, I began to dismantle and disassociate from that aspect of my culture. I did not want to be seen as a Latino, Chicano, Hispanic, Mexican, but rather just as an American. Sometimes I would also become angered when strangers assumed I spoke Spanish, because in my mind all I want to do is fit in, yet no matter what I do, because of the color of my skin, I will never be able to truly assimilate. I don’t know why there’s this fascination by children of first generation immigrants to fit in, but I feel like that is essentially seen as a model of success. If you can assimilate to the American way of life and truly fit in, that is a measure of success. 
By successfully disassociating us from the Hispanic community at large they are very effectively dismantling Latino socio-political-economic power. By breaking up our sense of community and belonging it’s harder for the Latino community to be able to come together as a whole and really realize the full potential of our peoples influence. Through this dismantling of our community they can heavily influence the power the Latino population can have on state and local elections. There has been studies that show that the Latino population is becoming more distant from the American political process because most of the Latino population in the U.S. is very young, and young people are a lot less likely to vote regardless of background. So in theory Latino political power should be increasing because the population is growing so rapidly, but it’s actually quite the opposite. Many people only vote because the issues directly affect the communities to which they belong too, and many times the problems don’t blatantly affect Latino’s.
It’s quite hysterical to think that the government and our society put so much work into tearing this once lively community apart, but as soon as election season starts candidates go around pandering for Latino votes. In a really sad attempt to make Hillary Clinton seem more appealing to Latino voters there was an article written by someone of her campaigns PR team that’s called “7 Things Hillary Clinton has in common with your abuela”. This article goes on to talk about all the ways your “abuela” or Grandma, as you could imagine there was a tremendous backlash by both the public and her critics, who accused her of “Hispandering”. There was numerous articles and millions of twitter posts who blew up with people explaining why she will never be like their abuela and proceeding to hashtag them with “#NotMyAbuela”, which in my opinion is pretty darn clever. Hundreds of thousands proceed to call her out on her privilege and things she said.

The Hispanic community is a very skeptical one at the moment to say the very least, and I feel as though this election has and will continue to be an interesting one. In our current situation we are faced with deciding which is the lesser of two evils. In American there is a culture of oppressing groups so that way when elections come around these politicians talk about all the problems they hope to fix, which in reality they caused to begin with. I think Latino’s in this country are looking for a leader who represents equality for our communities as well as other minority groups. Only time will tell what becomes of our current political climate.