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It’s Hard Out Here for a Latina Journalist in Trump’s America
I’ve personally witnessed the damage politicians’ anti-immigrant rhetoric can do
If I close my eyes whenever Donald Trump, one of his MAGA supporters, or spineless politicians talk, it’s as if I am transported back to the ’90s when then California Governor Pete Wilson terrorized the state for eight long years with his anti-immigrant rhetoric.
While California has since transformed into a blue state (23.57% of registered voters are Republicans), the rest of the country has taken a turn for the worse. Back when Pete Wilson reigned over the state, I wasn’t yet a journalist. I was a shy preteen learning about history, and seeing people on TV talk about “illegal aliens” taking jobs away from Americans. At the time, a large number of my family members were undocumented: my mom, stepdad, grandma, uncles, aunts, and cousins who came here as babies. They didn’t “cross the border illegally” like Trump and his pundits like to say to continue rallying for a useless wall. My family, like countless other families across the country, overstayed their tourist visas.
For years, many of them would save their hard-earned dollars to be able to buy a plane ticket before their six-month permit would expire. In order not to raise any red flags, they would repurchase a one-way ticket to the motherland, and often come back via Tijuana by car. Eventually, it became too expensive to keep taking the trips back home, ultimately overstaying their visas without being able to go back home. By now, most have been able to adjust their status via marriage; others have not. With close relatives dying throughout the years, they are unable to go back and see them one last time. This is a familiar story among those championing for the undocumented community.
Pete Wilson was the champion behind Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative that prohibited those in the state without legal status access to public education, emergency health care, and other public services. By November 1997, this xenophobic horror was deemed unconstitutional — but the trauma it caused the undocumented community was irreversible.
I was too young then to truly understand how politicians like Pete Wilson — who to this day stands by…
