‘That Mexican thing?’ It’s more American than you think

You may wonder why #ThatMexicanThing went viral.

{mosads}During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, when Senator Tim Kaine asked Governor Mike Pence to respond to offensive comments Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has made about Mexicans, Pence replied: “Senator, you’ve whipped out that Mexican thing again.”

If you have not been following the madness of the last year, this may even sound as if it was Kaine who said something offensive. But the reality is that it is Trump who has “whipped out that Mexican thing” again and again for over a year.

Some have welcomed those comments because they saw a candidate putting immigration in the limelight. But if this was merely a disagreement over policy — passionate as some of us may feel about that issue — the reaction from the vast majority of America’s Latino community, as well as from many of our fellow Americans, may not have been as intense.

We all know that stirring anxiety among voters, fabricating scapegoats, and tearing at the ties that bind our big, diverse, American family, are tactics used by politicians all too frequently.

The immigration meme has been used to stir anxiety about the growth of the Latino population in America — never mind that three-quarters of us are United States citizens according to 2014 Census data. That is why, even though Trump has referred to “Mexicans,” Latinos understand it means all of us. Because in dog-whistle politics, we are all Mexican.

And we are not alone. Memes about crime have been used to stir anxiety about blacks, terrorism to stoke fear against Muslims, and sloth to dismiss the concerns of all communities who feel they’ve been left behind.

We’ve been here before. And then as now, when we’ve managed to overcome our fears and move forward, the country has emerged stronger, and those seeking to paint others as less worthy were proven wrong. It happened with Germans, Irish, Italians, Japanese, and many others.

And when under attack, you can cower, or you can draw strength from family and community to overcome it. So instead of letting #ThatMexicanThing stand as trivializing a serious offense, or allowing it to remain as the negative from which it originated, people appropriated it to provide an accurate story of us as immigrants, as Latinos, and as Americans.

And the accuracy behind that story is aspiration, hard work, and hope.

If you want to reconnect with the real America, take a look at the stories of struggle for a better life collected under that hashtag, as told by those who have gotten a shot at a brighter future standing on the shoulders of those who came before them.

There’s the mom who cleaned hotel rooms for decades to ensure her kid would go to college; the abuelita and the dad who toiled in the farm fields to provide for their families; parents who served in the military; youth who went on to graduate from college. It’s the story of my own mother, who left all that was familiar to work as a seamstress in the garment industry in Los Angeles in order to build more opportunities for her children.

That Mexican thing is, really, the American thing.

Because anyone who has had to work with all their might for a chance to live a life with dignity or help realize it for their children — making contributions others may callously mock — can relate to those stories. And that is what gives me hope.

It gives me hope that in spite of continued attempts to divide us from one another, we all have the capacity to relate to our shared dreams and aspirations. In doing that, we can find the will to build the common ground needed to move forward and achieve progress for America, the nation we love.

Martinez De Castro is the deputy vice president of National Council of La Raza.