Imagine never belonging. You've done everything to belong your entire life but one or another thing about you is enough to deny you belong.
Imagine knowing you can never truly fit it. You deny it your whole life but your gut tells you to stop hoping for the impossible.
Imagine your superpower is something mundane. Something that masks your greatest failure but it's not the same thing between the groups you're trying to fit into.
Imagine being the greatest disappointment to the world only until you're useful. Then, when your usefulness is all used up, you're nothing again.
That's my life.
That's my fear.
That's my reality.
Again.
In 2016, I realized how much my country hated me. Not me individually, but as a general statistic in a sick plan to minimize my identity.
Then I realized how much my country despised me in 2024. This time, it was all aspects of my identity: Hispanic/Latino, a woman, first-generation American with immigrant parents, first-generation college student, low income.
"For the People" has been erased under the leadership of Donald J. Trump, a man with no political background before his first wreck of a presidential term and little independent success in his business dealings. "For the People" has been quietly rewritten as "For the (top 1% of) People."
In a nutshell, President Trump is a man convicted on 34 felony counts, a known racist and xenophobe, a failed businessman that filed multiple times for bankruptcy but hid it, a liar, the face of a country widely seen as a disappointment and, frankly, a despicable human being who has never made sense even when I tried.
I am not his enemy. I don't see myself as the enemy. I see myself as part of what the American Dream was supposed to be.
The American Dream is now synonymous with what's convenient to the white rich men in the 1% at the top want... and it's plainly obvious, they want a White America.
Trump and his horde make me his enemy. He sees me as a false representation of the American Dream, as a criminal despite my having no record. I fear that being white-passing would make him detest me more than my being a woman or of Hispanic/Latino descent.
White-passing means I'm just covering up my heritage, not that I can control it.
I'm unwanted by his government in whatever way you look at it.
In journalism, I am able to be unbiased when the work requires it. Sometimes it hurts. I always must understand that the work isn't to be of service to my emotions.
Journalism is to be of service to the masses regardless of if they like it or not.
Politics was supposed to be that way, to serve the People and not your own pockets.
Journalism is dying and politics is rotten.
The worst part of it? Dirty politics became especially expected under President Trump and biased journalism became the unfortunate norm.
The American Dream, where immigrants are supposed to be welcome and growth and movement between the classes was to be expected, is dead and rotted.
Journalism, which upholds truth and justice in reporting for the people, is hanging on by a thread. It serves either end of a severely extreme spectrum.
Politics is in its worst rot due to the infestation of hatred, self-service and sheer ridiculousness that Trump and his goons brought.
Trump is not for the People. Trump is not for his party. Trump is a joke.
I will never be wanted in the Neo-Nazi America that Trump's position in power is bringing. I will never be accepted by my people at face because I don't look like them. I am unwanted and erased because media says my people are copper-toned and not light skinned.
I have no place in Trump's America because his America is white and submissive and afraid of change.
The sad part isn't that I know or live that.
The sad part is that I expect that.
The worst part is that the world knows we're doomed.
And the world can't do anything to help.
Trump ruined the United States of America, her government, and her government's purpose.
All to serve his already-too-rich 1% buddies.
