Not being racist is easy: literally, just don't be a racist. But being anti-racist takes work, and it’s work that is not always easy or even beneficial to oneself. And there’s so much happening all the time, and everyone’s needs are different. Check on your Asian friends - don’t burden your Asian friends; go to marches - don’t take up too much space in marches; speak up - know when to shut up and just listen; at least share information if you can’t do nothing else.

And so here we are, in the American landscape of race wars, with many of our (mainly older) brethren trying to contend with the fact that here in the U.S. they are people of color, condemning racism while holding racist beliefs, and screaming at the top of their silenced voices that we too are white --please love us, America! We can be almost white-passing if we hide our mestizo and mulatto heritage an ignore the plight of other non-white POCs, while actively repudiating Black skin the way we are already used to doing anyway.

Jeanine Cummins’s novel, American Dirt, appeared early in 2020, drawing initial excitement and laudatory reviews. Soon, the book came under attack, with accusations and recriminations revolving around the issue of cultural appropriation. Critics questioned Cummins’s legitimacy and ability to write a novel about a Mexican mother and child on the run from a vicious drug cartel. Protests followed and a host of publicity events and television appearances were canceled.

Before then, the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 eliminated national origin quotas but set worldwide limits on the number of persons that could migrate to the U.S. This act is likely one of the biggest causes of the “hispanization” of North America because it established a system of family-based and employment-based preference for issuing visas. It was the driving force behind the enormous influx of immigrants from Mexico and Central America during the 70s and 80s, a period that is considered the crux of Latin American immigration. 

The fading of Spanglish, not unlike Ebonics, could be a response to two separate trends we have seen over the last decade: terrorism and gender-empowerment. Spanglish flourished in the 1980s and 1990s. Two factors fueled its rise. The first was the economic collapse of Latin America -- an international debt crisis precipitated when Mexico was forced to devalue the peso in August 1982. 

Arguing that every citizen should have the right to vote, Clinton argued the common sense position that we should do what we can to make voting easier, not make it harder. She called for restoring the Voting Rights Act, to ensure pre-screening of election law changes that potentially discriminate against classes of voters. She embraced the bipartisan presidential commission recommendations for expanding early absentee and mail voting and for ensuring that no one waits more than 30 minutes to cast a vote.

Twenty-three percent of non-voting Latinos who responded to the poll said that Obama’s decision to delay executive action made them more enthusiastic about the president and the Democratic Party, while 60 percent of non-voting Latinos said the delay made them less enthusiastic. This is notable because Latinos have historically backed Democrats by wide margins.

In 2010, fueled by frustration over Arizona’s approval of its controversial immigration law known as SB 1070, volunteers and paid organizers with One Arizona began knocking on doors to register Latinos to vote and to get them signed up for the permanent early voting list. They also began going door-to-door reminding Latino voters to either mail back their ballots or turn them in at the county recorder’s office before election day. 

The numbers are depressing and the variety questionable. But despite the apparent apathy of the industry, recent studies have shown a growing interest from the Latino market in both purchase and expansion of video game systems, a growth that the industry has barely begun to notice.According to Simmons, Latinos are 32 percent more likely than non-Latinos to consider video games their main source of entertainment. 

A recent study from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism of the University of Southern California gives cause for more than just pause. One of the findings in a study on race and ethnicity in 600 popular films conducted by Stacey Smith, Katherine Pieper and Mark Choueiti is that while Latinas were more likely to be featured in popular films than any other race or ethnicity, no other race/ethnicity is more sexualized.