Baca and the Tale of Immigration

While reading the first 66 pages of Jimmy Santiago Baca's novel, A Place to Stand, I started to identify with Baca’s story of discrimination as a foreigner/immigrant. Many times Baca talks about this distrust his family had developed toward white people over generations. His ancestors fought against the Americans that where moving into and take the land that his family called theirs. Baca’s ancestors burn the farms of these people that they saw as invaders. What his family saw the taking of their land laded the foundation for the future generational distrust of white people. In Baca’s time his family claims that the whites cheated his uncle out of money and sought to create laws that were designed against Mexicans. These actions by the whites lead Baca’s father to have a feeling of disenfranchisement and that was pasted down to Baca.

 As someone who has lived three fourths of their life in a country where they are not only not a natural born citizen, but also not as a citizen I feel Baca’s struggle of being an outside very close to my heart. Now, as a white boy for the suburbs who has sounded like a Jersey kid since the age of seven years old I clearly have not faced the same level of discrimination as Baca has, but still I can understand his struggle. As someone who nowadays wears his nationality and all things that have caused some level discrimination proudly on my sleeve I can remember most time I have been attacked for those things. I can vividly hear every time I was told that if I do not agree with something in America that I should “go back to where I am from”. Must of those times were well before the xenophobic rhetoric of the trump presidency was even a light on the horizon(which is why I was not surprised when he connected with a large portion of Americans).

Baca’s generational struggle for acceptance as an immigrate is one that most Americans should be ashamed of because for a country of immigrants it seems to have welcomed or wanted immigrants. America talks of loving immigrants, but then treats us as a parasite that must be exterminated. 

But I am only one person and only have my keyhole to view the world through, so please if you have any experience with immigration or discrimination please tell me in a response to this blog.

-AMC