This 18-year-old is the daughter of an undocumented Mexican. She is the GOP’s nightmare.
But for her mother, with whom I spoke about the upcoming Feb. 5 primaries, she embodies a dream that steadied her through nine straight hours of walking the day she set out to cross the border with her own mother 25 years ago.
She was 18 years old that day. The Mexico City native crossed over into San Clemente, Calif., in an arduous walk that began on the Mexican side at 9 p.m. and ended at 5 a.m. on the U.S. side. Twice the small group she traveled with was caught by la migra, now known just as appropriately as ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and returned to the Mexican side. On the third try in as many days the group made it and since then, this woman who has no legal status to be in the U.S. has raised a family while working six-day work weeks.
And next month, her American-born daughter will vote in the state primary that will propel the candidates that much closer to the White House.
It is a momentous occasion in the family, not the least because most Americans wave off electoral participation as if it were a mosquito while others clamor for a chance to be counted.
Only 30 percent of registered voters go to the polls. Tragically, most people here do not view voting as a privilege, a civic responsibility or even an obligation given the country’s importance as a superpower that can poke its rockets into anyone’s business.
But this woman considers voting a gift and has told her daughter so. The family’s first and historic vote will go to support Hillary Clinton, who has a plan for everything that matters to the family: war, immigration, the economy.
D.C. politics is a fast lane of abruptly changing signs. After one too many GOP political and religious movers and shakers were caught with their pants down in sordid same-sex relationships, and after the fervor over abortion and stem cell research failed to mobilize the GOP base, the Bush administration successfully positioned immigration as the new divisive issue.
With a Latino population that today includes more than 45 million American citizens and will have increased to more than 140 million in less than 50 years, one can see where the GOP would suddenly become paranoid and manipulate the media’s short attention span to conjure images of wild-eyed Latinos racing across the border to rob excellent toilet-cleaning jobs from red-blooded Americans.
With the exception of Cubans, who as a voting bloc are Castro-hating Republicans, Latinos in general vote Democrat. The children of undocumented workers who were born here are American citizens. As each turns 18 and registers to vote, the GOP sees its power diminishing. It is payback for the party that demonized their parents.
At the 2004 National Council of La Raza’s annual conference in Philadelphia, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean predicted that the GOP would make immigration its battle hymn of the republic. It was a warning that few heard.
Republican strategists went on to recast Latinos as a monolith of narco-traffickers and murderers in order to pull Americans on board the anti-immigration train.
The white-guy pundits joined the bandwagon and the nation’s court jesters, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report and Bill Maher of Real Time with Bill Maher countered with amusing on-target commentary that nonetheless fell on deaf ears on the conservative side. Meanwhile, on the solemn airwaves of PBS, Bill Moyers Journal has been presenting in-depth analysis into the issues of the day. But the youth vote is not watching that; it isn’t funny.
The Mexican daughter doesn’t need to be entertained into political consciousness. She was raised in it.
When Hillary Clinton roared past the pollsters in New Hampshire who had her losing by 40,000 votes and into the reality of her winning by 8,000 votes, pundits were at a loss. Polls are their bread and butter. Without them, they don’t know what to say.
But this family doesn’t listen to them anyway.
“If you don’t vote, it’s as if you don’t exist,” the mother told me. She said it with the certainty that accompanies her own personal experiences as an invisible person to most and invented menace to many. Her daughter is bringing the family out into the open.
