Goodbye Progress: A Latina’s Reaction to the President Elect
Goodbye Progress: A Latina’s Reaction to the President Elect
by Paola Santiago
Today I woke up knowing three things.
Number one, Donald Trump is now President of the United States. Number two, I’m still a journalist and will have to report on his presidency with an unbiased voice. Number three, I am Latina-American, and my reality feels like a nightmare.
After I’m done writing articles today about votes, and who won what, and what levies passed where, I will have to call my Dominican grandfather. I will have to tell him to double and triple check his citizenship papers that he has yet to receive. I will have to tell him to call the immigration office in New York and ask, again, when his papers would arrive and when he would become a naturalized citizen. He and my family will have to live with the fear that Donald Trump as President might deport him.
I grew up in Puerto Rico thinking that everything in America was better and until yesterday, I really believed that. I wanted Puerto Rico to become a state so the U.S. government could help mend our political corruption, our failing economy, and our dismal education system.
I would tell my cousins back home of how well they would do if they moved here — how welcomed they would feel because 15 years had passed since I first stepped foot on bonafide American soil, and I was confident that the racism and discrimination I faced as a child before President Obama’s terms was if not long gone, but incredibly diminished.
These are things I can no longer say about this country, let alone the state I came to love. Maybe I was naive, too hopeful, too proud of how far we have come and how much social progress we had achieved because to me, America was great. But now, what I see for my future and the future of my family, is four years or more of systemic neglect for my population initiated by nearly 60 million people.
And yes it’s your fault. It’s my fault. It’s the fault of everyone in this election because we allowed it to happen. You didn’t vote in the primaries, you voted for a third-party candidate, you voted for actual Donald Trump, you didn’t care enough and thought, like me, this can’t possibly happen, or worst of all, you didn’t vote at all. Everything will be ok.
Yet, this election created two options for president that ultimately ravaged our society with scorching division. We’re getting a wall but there has always been one.
I hope and pray that Trump actually follows through with his promise to reinvigorate rural America, because that would be the only saving grace of the next four years. I’ll concede my right to sexual health decisions, my reproductive rights, and my right to be treated with decency and equity as a Latina woman for four years of whatever Trump will do for rural America.
I’ll wait. In the meantime, I’ll lick my wounds and stand as my people have always stood — strong against the tide.
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