by Jorge Ramos
ALSO BY JORGE RAMOS
Take a Stand
A Country for All
No Borders
A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, FEBRUARY 2018
English translation copyright © 2018 by Ezra E. Fitz
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Simultaneously published in Spanish by Vintage Español, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Copyright © 2018 by Jorge Ramos.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.
Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525563792
Ebook ISBN 9780525563808
Cover design by Perry De La Vega
Cover photograph © Ben Brewer/Reuters
www.vintagebooks.com
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Contents
Cover
Also by Jorge Ramos
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Get Out of My Country
Far from Home
Stranger
My Road North
The Revolution Is Here
Hatred
There Is No Invasion
A Useless Wall
No One Is Illegal
Obama: Deporter in Chief
Our 2016 Mistake
Fear and Dreamers
Latinos: The Struggle to Define Ourselves
Being an Immigrant in the Trump Era
When I Return to Mexico
A Mexican Childhood
On Amphibians and Translators
When to Stop Being Neutral
It’s Just Television, That’s All
Disobey! (A Letter to My Children)
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
For the Dreamers, my heroes
I have been a stranger here in my own land.
—SOPHOCLES, Antigone
Wherever you have friends, that is your country, and wherever you receive love, that is your home.
—TIBETAN PROVERB
Once there was a way
To get back homeward.
—THE BEATLES, “Golden Slumbers”
Prologue
There are times when I feel like a stranger in this country where I’ve spent more than half my life. I’m not complaining, and it’s not for lack of opportunity. But it is something of a disappointment. I never would have imagined that after having spent thirty-five years in the United States, I would still be a stranger to so many. But that’s how it is.
Despite this feeling, I want to begin with gratitude. The United States is the birthplace of my children, whom I love more than anything in this world. It is here that I was able to pursue my passion and my profession—journalism—with absolute freedom. Here we can feel the energy of change: a desire for openings and innovations that can be hard to find in other parts of the world. Almost all of us here are either immigrants or the descendants of foreigners, and that has always helped us to cross borders and exceed the limits of what we thought was possible. Democracy is still the accepted political system here, and the notion of equality was established from the very moment this nation declared its independence. Here, people can live well and enjoy justice, which, in its original sense, means giving everyone his or her due.
That’s why I live here. I have the wonderful circumstance and privilege—one shared by millions of people—of living in a country that accepts you with open arms. I became an American of my own free will, and the United States willingly accepted me.
Of course, none of this erases where I came from. I was born and raised in Mexico, and I will never cease to be Mexican. I love the solidarity of the Mexican people; it is a wonderful nation, one in which you will never feel alone, with a magical and incomparable history. It is an extraordinary country bursting with hopes and desires and extending its culture across the globe: a very different place from the one we see in the news, portrayed through images of violence and corrupt politicians. Most of my family still lives in Mexico. I visit them several times a year, and I am always concerned about what is happening on both sides of the border.
Both my private and public lives are binational and transnational. I am at once Mexican, American, Latino, foreigner, immigrant, emigrant, and chilango, among many other things. In other words, to many people, I represent the Other.
But the United States as a country has historically been accustomed to others—newcomers, those born elsewhere, those who see and speak differently—and therefore has developed a healthy tolerance for those who appear different.
But not everywhere. And not all the time.
The history of this nation registers cycles of acceptance when it comes to foreigners, followed by cycles of tremendous rejection and discrimination. This latter cycle is the one in which we are living now.
There are parts of the country that are more resistant to immigrants, blaming them unfairly for the primary problems we face, from a lack of well-paying jobs to crime. And there are politicians who take advantage of this fact in order to divide the nation and win votes. Politicians such as Donald Trump.
But let me clarify something.
This is not a book about Donald Trump. But his entry into politics and his rise to power are directly related to the growing anti-immigrant sentiment thriving across the United States. It’s as bad as I’ve ever seen it since I first arrived here in 1983. It’s as if Trump has given people permission to attack immigrants and make racist remarks, just as he has done.
Words matter. And the problem isn’t limited to Trump: there are the sixty-three million Americans who voted for him and who, in many ways, think as he does. Yes, hatred has been brewing since Donald Trump stepped into the world of politics, but we cannot accept or normalize it.
Trump’s attacks on immigrants and his apparent attempt to halt the demographic change that the United States is experiencing are going to fail. He is swimming against the current. He announced his campaign on June 16, 2015, but the U.S. Census Bureau subsequently published a population report estimating that as of July 1, 2015—just fifteen days later—more than half (50.2 percent) of all infants under the age of one had been born to minority parents.
The United States has never been a pure country. Conquistadores such as Juan Ponce de León and Hernando de Soto spoke Spanish in what is now the Southeast some two centuries before the first Pilgrims arrived in New England. There is evidence of the presence of Africans in our lands since the early seventeenth century. And the Native Americans preceded them all.
The very essence of the United States is to be a multiethnic, multiracial, multicultural nation, a diverse and tolerant one created by immigrants under the guiding principles of freedom, equality, and democracy.
Trump does not seem to understand this nation’s history. Ultimately, we will look back on his presidency as one of the saddest moments in an already long list of racial and ethnic strife. It’s as if we haven’t learned anything from our past. For now, though, we will have to endure and resist it.
* * *
—
Sometimes, I think I’ve been preparing myself for this moment all my life. This is a book about what it means to be a Latino immigrant in the time of Trump. But it begins at the precise moment when one of his bodyguards threw me out of a press conference. That changed so many things for me. So this is a book about what it means to be a stranger in the United States during the first half of the twenty-first century.
�
�Stranger” is a word that simultaneously denotes both the foreign, extraño, and the foreigner, extranjero. That’s why we decided to use it as the title for both the English and the Spanish versions of this book. It is a more complete and more inclusive title, but also a more contradictory one. How can someone who has spent more than half his life in a certain country be a stranger?
Originally, this book was going to be titled Far from Home. I have moved dozens of times here in the United States, and I always feel as if I’m looking for that same sense of happiness, security, and tranquility that I felt in the house where I lived for almost two decades in Mexico City.
It is, I know, an impossible search. Memories are tied not only to physical places but also to specific moments. That is why we can’t return home, at least not to the house that all immigrants have left behind and that now exists only in our minds and in our memories.
This book is an explanation of my life in Mexico and the United States. But it is also an honest and sometimes painful account of what it means to live far from Mexico and, also, far from the United States. In these pages I will seek to explain this distance that I have been feeling lately in this nation where I live. This book is the work of an immigrant, and his narrative will come and go, crossing borders, without permits or papers.
Get Out of My Country
“Get out of my country.”
I can still hear that sentence with absolute clarity, as if it occupies a specific place in my mind.
It’s a scar.
Deep within.
It happened some time ago, yet it still rings in my ears as if it were yesterday. I don’t even know the name of the man who said it to me. But I have his face and his hatred etched in my eyes and all over my skin.
When somebody hates you, you feel it across your entire body. It’s usually just words. But the shrillness of words laden with hatred works its way under your fingernails, into your hair, around your eyelids. Of course, it also enters through your ears. Eventually, everything seems to be welling up somewhere between the throat and the stomach, to the point where you feel as if you’re drowning. If the feeling builds up over a long enough period of time, something could burst.
The man who said “Get out of my country” was a Trump supporter. I know this because he was wearing a pin identifying the then candidate on one of his lapels. But most of all, I know this because of the way he said it to me. He looked me straight in the eyes, pointed a finger at me, and shouted.
Time and again I’ve gone back to watch video of the incident, which took place in August 2015, and I still don’t know how I was able to remain calm. I remember the tone of his voice caught me by surprise. Trump, with the brutal and cowardly help of a bodyguard, had just ejected me from a press conference in Dubuque, Iowa. I had just started thinking about how to respond when suddenly I heard a madman shouting and pointing his finger.
I looked up, and—instead of simply ignoring his rudeness, as I would have preferred—I settled myself and simply replied, “I’m also a U.S. citizen.”
His response made me laugh. “Whatever,” he said, sounding like a teenager. A police officer who overheard the exchange outside the press conference stepped between us, and that was where it ended. But the hatred stuck.
Hatred is contagious.
And Trump is infectious.
I am convinced that if Trump had treated me differently, his supporter would not have spoken to me as he had. But Trump had just thrown me out of a press conference, and that, somehow, had given this man permission to direct his hatred toward me.
In over three decades as a journalist, such a thing has happened to me only once before. It was 1991, during the first Ibero-American Summit, in Guadalajara, Mexico. One of Fidel Castro’s bodyguards shoved me and threw me aside as I was questioning the Cuban dictator about the lack of basic freedoms on the island.
Trump also used a bodyguard to prevent me from asking a question. He and Fidel used the same tactics of physical force—via their bodyguards—to handle an uncomfortable encounter with the press.
My problems with Trump began in New York on June 16, 2015, the day he launched his presidential campaign. It was there that he made the following statement: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best….They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people….It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America….”
These are racist comments. Period.
He lumped all Mexican and Latin American immigrants in the same bag. He made a sweeping generalization. He lacked the intellectual honesty to say that only some immigrants commit crimes, not the majority of them. Later, several of Trump’s supporters swore that he was referring only to a specific type of undocumented immigrant—the most violent ones—not all who come across the southern border.
Perhaps. We will never know for sure. But regardless, that is not what he said. What I do know is that when Trump launched his campaign, he accused all Mexican immigrants of being criminals, drug traffickers, and rapists.
What he said is absolutely false.
All the studies I have read—especially the one conducted by the American Immigration Council—have come to the same conclusion: namely, that “immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes or be behind bars than the native-born, and high rates of immigration are associated with lower rates of violent crime and property crime.”
Trump started his path to the White House with a massive lie.
His first statements as a candidate took me by surprise. They bothered me deeply. For days and even weeks later, I felt very unsettled. I wasn’t sure how to respond. As a reporter, as a Latino, and as an immigrant, I had to do something. I just didn’t know exactly what. It would have to be a well-calibrated answer, not the diplomatic and aseptic response of a politician. Nor could it be an insulting jab.
Univision, the company I’ve been working for since January 1984, had made the courageous decision to break off its business relationship with Trump and not broadcast the Miss USA beauty pageant—which was owned in part by the businessman—on Spanish-language television for “insulting remarks about Mexican immigrants.” This would mark the beginning of a lengthy legal battle.
Despite all that, I felt Trump had to be confronted on a journalistic level as well. This was not simply a business matter. So on the same day that Univision announced the end of its working relationship with Trump, I sent him a handwritten letter requesting an interview. That letter, dated June 25, 2015, read as follows:
Mr. Trump:
I want to write you personally to request an interview. But so far your team has declined.
I am sure you have a lot of things to say…and I have a lot of things to ask. I’ll go to New York or wherever you would like.
If you would like to talk first over the phone, my personal cell is 305-794-1212.
I know this is an important issue for you as it is for me.
All the best,
Jorge Ramos
I sealed it inside a FedEx Express envelope and sent it to his New York offices. The next day, out of nowhere, I began receiving hundreds of calls and text messages, some more insulting than others. I didn’t understand what was happening until a coworker of mine came into my office and said, “Trump just posted your cell phone number online.”
These were some of the hundreds of texts I received:
Jorge Ramos- Donald Trump placed your personal letter online and has your number written on it. I’m sorry about what he did.
Go F yourself George Porgie!
Please take the anti-U.S. Univision back to the corrupt 3rd world country Mexico and you can go with it. Thx and have a great trip back.
#Trump2016. Build those walls to stop illegals from crossing our borders.
You’re a racist dirtbag. Nobody wants your illegal cousins in
this country.
Trump was right…Latinos need to stay off the ‘I’m offended’ bandwaggon. It’s embarrasing….You don’t speak for all Latinos!
Trump 2016! Come to this country legally or leave! Illegal is illegal!!!!
Fuck you
In fact, Trump had answered me via Instagram. He wrote, “@Univision said they don’t like Trump yet Jorge Ramos and their other anchors are begging me for interviews.”
Along with that brief message, he included a photograph of the letter I had written to him, without having redacted my phone number.
In addition to these messages loaded with hatred and rage, I received a lot of support. There were others, too, looking to take advantage of the situation and ask me for a job, offer me advice…even people looking for help publishing books or recording songs.
It was clear Trump did not want to grant me an interview. However, there were other ways to confront him. Trump had just launched his presidential campaign, and one of its benefits was that he would constantly be talking to the press. That was our opportunity.
We spent nearly two months thinking about what to do. Then, one fine day, Dax Tejera—executive producer of America with Jorge Ramos, the program I hosted for the Fusion television network—had a great idea.
“You’re not going to like what I’m about to say, but we have to go to Iowa,” he said as he walked into my office and plopped down on the only sofa I have. There were many important matters to discuss, but he just sat there, waiting for my reaction.
“Iowa?” I asked. “Why do we have to go to Iowa?”