On the night of the United States elections, I was chatting with the editorial team about El Chisme we had prepared for last Thursday. It no longer felt right. Of course, it did not.
I am not proud to write that I was committed to avoiding election content, especially leading to November 3rd. These past four years have felt like a frantic nightmare, and not because this past administration created the distress. They merely tapped into the ugliest parts of white supremacy, greed, and racism in this country and just ran with it. Many of us already knew the America that came to the forefront, and albeit I had accepted this long time ago, it did not make it less traumatic to live through.
Like clockwork, articles and podcasts started to pop up about the Latinx vote leading to the elections. Somehow, even though —according to Latino USA— we are now the largest non-white group of voters, they manage to routinely tune us out until about a year before each election. Add to that indifference the vast misunderstanding of Latinx groups being monolithic, and you’ve got yourself a big-fat plate of ‘surprises.’ To those not paying attention, of course.
We have always been intimately aware that Cuban-Americans in Florida are more traditionally Republican. As well as that the more conservative and yes, machista, members of our Latinx communities were openly discussing voting for Trump for years, no matter what he said or did. As staff opinion editor at the NY Times, Isvett Verde, eloquently puts it in her latest piece, “It would be easy to dismiss these voters as self-hating, or racists. But that’s a simplistic way of viewing this wildly diverse and complex demographic.”
To keep racism out of the Latinx vote conversation is to add more leña to the fire that is ultimately burning us. Black people, especially Black women, were behind Philly, Detroit, and Atlanta, aka all of the big cities that ended up flipping Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia, respectively. Afro-Latinas have been organizing for years. I have seen them time and time again building bridges where there were none, speaking their truth even when our very own Dominican community shunned them and welcoming us, non-Black Latinxs, with open arms. And what do we do? Erase them. Silence them. Forget them. Our proximity to whiteness thrives in our society. To my dismay, non-Black Latinas somehow forget that nothing worth building or toppling can be done without all of us.
About two days into the excruciating wait, a friend called me to tell me about a conversation she had with two fellow Dominicans. These were highly educated people who considered Trump the best option based on religion (a mystery to me given his track record) and economic gains through government payments (the same ones Republicans have relentlessly blocked for months during the pandemic). This is information that is widely available to read and make an educated argument about. Yet, the elections had come and gone, and these people were still defending their choice, even when faced with facts that quite literally proved the exact opposite.
This behavior begs the question: how can we still follow ideas, candidates, and parties so blindly?
By the time you read this, the US will be about a solid week into what already feels like a New Year. Maybe we’ll still be celebrating in the streets, or we’ll be knee-deep in organizing for the work that there is still to do. For one, I assume I will be continuing to sleep through the night and feeling my shoulders more relaxed. Skepticism will still be there. On every zoom call with white women (hello, 55%), and with every plan the new administration lays out, I will be committed to follow and question everything, as we all should.
But let it be known that waking up on November 7th to pop champagne at 9 am and cheer on the streets of Oakland is and will always be a moment I will cherish, for I have been reminded what hope feels like.
