Can You See Us Now America?

Yeah, but they vote as we learned on Election day. 

As a bi-cultural person, half white, half Latino, the first thing I notice about white people in general is that they don't see brown people.  Really, they don't.  Kinda the way that you don't see, maids, or doormen or refrigerators, or toasters on kitchen counters.  White people see black people.  There is a mix of emotions that whites have for blacks, fear and guilt being part of that mix, whatever. But my white friends and relatives outside of Miami really don't see Latinos beyond Mexican lawn men. White people also get upset at Latinos who don't want to be lawn men. One day my Cuban husband came home upset one day because during a board meeting, as a joke, the company VP pointed to the gardeners working outside the conference room and said to him: "You're lucky you're not out there with them." Everyone in the meeting laughed. He just happens to be a nuclear chemical engineer. 

But blacks and whites really don't see Latinos. Until this Election Tuesday. For years smart white politicians like Jeb Bush, John McCain and Marco Rubio have been saying, ignore Latinos at your own peril.  Well the old white men who run the Republican party just opened their eyes and saw brown for the first time. White men could always look to Miami Cubans and say "hey, but the Cubans vote for us!"  But two days ago, 47% of Cubans voted for the incumbent http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/11/07/3086875/cuban-american-support-for-obama.html.  I think Cubans, like all other Latinos can read between the lines about things like "self-deportation" and laws that are passed to make Latino looking people walk around with "proof of citizenship."

When I say I was born in Honduras, to a Honduran mother, they say, "you're not Latino, you have blue eyes!"  Well, in all honesty, Hondurans say that too.  Yet my point is, that my heart is very latino, and that all brown people are not lawn workers and maids. That we do not all come from Mexico. That we are diverse, we are beautiful in our shortness, our browness, in our Latinoness.(Yeah, we can be tall and blond and blue eyed too.)  We are a hard-working, growing group in these United States. We got this President elected, same as we will the next one.

Can you see us now America?