Red, White and Blue
By: Kim Vazquez
Tags: Politics, Bias, Election 2020, Diversity And Inclusion, Hispanics

What this U.S. Presidential Election Means to a Puerto Rican

Photo by: Kim Vazquez

The day after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, my dad, who had been visiting us in N.Y., announced he was cutting his vacation short and returning to the relative safety of his island, Puerto Rico. He looked depressed and discouraged. I had never seen him like that before. He pounded his fist on the counter like he had done when I was a teenager and felt disrespected by me, then cursed the blind and ignorant people who would vote for a man like Donald Trump.

A little less than a year later, my husband and I visited Puerto Rico when Hurricane Maria slammed into the island. We had known it was coming but decided to stay so that my father and grandmother wouldn’t be left alone. No one expected the ferocity of the hurricane. We knew it would be bad, but we didn’t expect ‘end of days’ bad. The destruction caused by Maria is indescribable with just words.

After two weeks of fear and despair waiting for help from the country for which so many Puerto Ricans had fought and died, President Trump finally came to Puerto Rico. He threw paper towels into a crowd then declared that what had happened wasn’t a real catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina had been.

Trump managed to minimize this tragedy even more by tying up funds allocated to Puerto Rico by Congress.

Puerto Ricans lived without electricity for a year after, and (according to a Harvard University study) 4,546 citizens died because of the slow response from the Federal Government.

Many Americans were outraged by this second class citizen treatment of their fellow Americans, while others reveled in their condoned ability to let their true selves be free. With a leader that doesn’t respect minorities and refers to them, among many other things, as rapists and criminals, his followers feel emboldened to denigrate and attack those they think are less than.

Over the next few years, every time I went for a walk with my brother or to the store with my mother, I expected some idiot to tell me I needed to speak English because I was in America. So I marched with millions of others to protest the injustice of bigotry. I took part in rallies and demonstrations. And I created fanciful scenarios in my head where some bigot would start yelling at us while we were at the park or in the supermarket, telling us to go back where we came from. I had rehearsed the choice words I would use as a response. And I delighted in the thought that I would respond to their bigotry by using one of the stereotypes they had assigned us — loud and over-emotional Puerto Rican woman. I would speak a mile a minute while progressively getting louder and louder. I’d go back and forth between Spanish and English. I’d use lots of hand gestures and move my head from side to side while pressing my lips together tightly as a sign of distaste for the other person.

But after seeing the increasing number of bigoted and racists confrontations and physical altercations on social media and the news, I grew increasingly apprehensive about the possibility of being involved in one.

I no longer delighted at the thought of having a confrontation with a bigot and having to stand up for myself and mine. I felt apprehensive about my surroundings and whether the people around me in the street were Trumpers or not. I didn’t know if I was only starting to realize it or if they had always been there lurking in the shadows and hiding under the guise of fake acceptance, but there seemed to be a lot more people who felt and thought like the president than I had previously known.

New York is pretty much a liberal haven, but more and more TRUMP 2020 flags had been popping up in specific neighborhoods and areas over time. I had never seen so many people being so political in all my years living there. And in my mind, it wasn’t the politics that they were responding to; it was the other stuff — the ‘we’re better than you’ stuff. And the ‘you will not replace us’ stuff.

My whole family stressed about the state of politics in the U.S.

Every conversation we had started with, revolved around or ended with Trump and some idiotic or bigoted thing he had said or done. And the people around him that participated in, condoned, and accepted the behavior.

However, many voices throughout the U.S. condemned his actions and beliefs. They found his actions reprehensible and un-American and spoke up about it. There were patriotic whistle-blowers and activists. Most Americans are good people who will stand up for each other and fight to correct the wrongs impinged on minorities during the Trump administration or the already existent ones that it chose to ignore. And months before the 2020 election, I felt hopeful that Trump would lose by a landslide. Especially after his disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and all the jobs and livelihoods lost. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of lives lost.

My family and I donned our masks and participated in early voting. We took pictures and posted them to social media, making sure we used the proper blue wave hashtags. We reminded other Hispanics of the damage done to us, so overtly, during the last four years and took comfort in the belief that things were about to change and that everything would get better.

But the closer it got to election day, the more TRUMP 2020 flags I saw around my neighborhood, and a sinking feeling started to take hold in the pit of my stomach.

On election day, as I made dinner, my husband and I agreed to deliberately ignore any election news. He knew it would take days, if not weeks, for the results, and there was no need to stress over every election update on the news. But by 7:00 PM, my brother was texting with updates. I texted back in my best big sister tone that he should do what we were doing and stay away from the news. He called me and said, “I can’t. I have to know what’s happening. If this guy wins another four years, we have to leave.” And with that, my resolve evaporated, and I turned on CNN. My husband was annoyed, but I couldn’t help it. I spent the next few hours exchanging any nuggets of information acquired with the rest of my family. And by 10:00 PM, my husband had jumped on the bandwagon with the rest of us, sending out texts and tweets while trying to calm me down.

After tossing and turning all night and only getting maybe, three hours of sleep, I finally gave up and got out of bed at 5:00 AM. CNN’s breaking news opener music from the apartment above me made me do a beeline to my phone charging on the kitchen counter. I opened my Twitter app and started scrolling. That sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach got worse. The longed-for blue wave hadn’t happened. I texted my mom about all the red on the electoral map. She responded immediately, “It’s still early. Lots of votes to count. We’ll be okay.”

The next few days were a blur of sleepless nights and constant checks of the electoral map. When my husband and I went for a walk to the supermarket and saw a truck decked out in a ridiculous amount of TRUMP 2020 flags, I got angry, but I kept quiet. I would have loved to yell at the driver and tell him to go back where he came from, but the thought of a big red-faced white guy filled with militant hatred and bigotry coming at me was scary enough to make me keep my mouth shut.

The day they called Pennsylvania for Biden, I finally let myself relax a little. My father was happy that things could go back to normal. And my brother was just satisfied that Trump would be gone. But, the amount of red on that electoral map was not going to let me relax completely. Those red states represent a total of 73,799,071 people who are okay with the hatred and racism that spews from the Trump administration. They also seem to accept its ineptitude and indifference.

Even after the Trump administration’s biased and ineffective response to Hurricane Maria forced over 300,000 Puerto Ricans to move to Florida and register to vote, the state still couldn’t flip from red to blue. And according to election day exit polls, the number of Hispanics that voted for Trump in 2020 has risen from 2016. These are the Hispanics who think they don’t ‘act like other Hispanics’ or don’t ‘look Hispanic’ and therefore are better than their brothers and sisters. The need to fit in is strong and has been encouraged systematically over generations by those in power. Or maybe these Trump-supporting Hispanics have seen their paychecks grow and feel that this is justification for selling out the rest of us.

This kind of self-hatred and need to fit in with the perceived elites will only justify and encourage Trump’s followers. Before you know it, anyone that is different, in any way, will be ostracized, including the people that think they are immune because they don’t ‘act like’ or ‘don’t look like’ whatever group is vilified at that moment.

So even now, when I feel pretty sure that Biden will be taking over as president on January 20th, I can’t help but be nervous and enraged. The masks of acceptance and inclusion that many people wear have come off, and it will be hard to put them back on now that they think they don’t need to. The bigotry instilled in us over generations has been unleashed by Trump and those who condone his administration.

But, maybe, that’s a good thing. It can allow us to take a good hard look at who we are as people and a nation. We can start seeing what has been so apparent for many of us all our lives, that our institutions, systems, and society are inherently biased and have always been so. And, maybe, we can use this to create a nation where we are all accepted and included, where liberty and the pursuit of happiness genuinely apply to all.