The Cloak Removed

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
Ralph Ellison

We’ve come together to say that we are workers, not criminals; that we work hard, we pay our taxes, we live by the rules, and we want this great America to take us into account.
Antonio Villaraigosa, Mayor of Los Angeles

Very impressive rallies.
John Kasich, Anchor, Fox News


I grew up thinking that, as a boy living in the United States, I was invisible. I speak not of H.G. Wells’s invisible man—which, incidentally, might have been a lot of fun—but of Ralph Ellison’s: someone rendered invisible because of his or her ethnicity.

In the Los Angeles of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Latinos and Latinas were everywhere. Yet the government and the media ignored us. It was as if we didn’t exist. And mainstream USA never discussed—much less acknowledged—our contributions.

I can still recall how excited I was my first day in fourth grade when the teacher announced that, for the entire school year, we were going to study the history of California. This was a subject that has always interested me, passionately so. As a boy, two of my favorite places to visit were the Museum of Natural History and Olvera Street. At the Museum, I could spend hours looking at the dioramas of Los Angeles’s first settlers—who had migrated from Los Alamos, Sonora, México. And whenever I visited the cobblestone lanes of Olvera Street, the historical contributions of Latinas and Latinos to California became undeniably real.

Because of this, in fourth grade, I expected to become visible. I fully expected the curriculum to discuss our presence, our ways, and our qualities. But the teacher, although well meaning, closely followed a text that barely touched upon the indigenous people who lived in California prior to the arrival of the Franciscans. The book exalted the work of Fray Junipero Serra, the Italian founder of the missions, for bringing European values to what was then the farthest northwestern outpost of the Spanish Empire. The Californios, the settlers who founded Los Angeles and other prominent cities in the state, were cursorily mentioned. But for everyone’s enjoyment there was a sidebar explaining why California’s most important communities had Spanish names and what these meant.

That was it. According to our text, the history of California started with the Bear Flag Rebellion and the westward expansion of the United States.

I was crushed and, if anything, the authoritative weight of what was taught in the classroom reinforced my feelings of being invisible.

It wasn’t until my family moved to Nicaragua—when I was eleven—that my exposure to the richness of our history and culture really began. And it was during those adolescent years, while living in Central America, that I started to feel great pride in my heritage.

But while I was away, things had begun to change in the United States. When I returned to California to attend college, in 1972, I immediately detected a small tear in the invisibility cloak: in some political and cultural forums there were actual discussions about our existence. The Chicano Movement—the Mexican-American Civil Rights struggle whose rise I had missed—was in large part responsible for this aperture.

And gradually, over the ensuing years, the threads of the cloak started to dissolve, and Latinos and Latinas, with great sacrifices, carved out spaces for themselves in every endeavor, including my favorite—literature.

Astoundingly, the members of the House of Representatives slept through all this. How else can one explain the passing of such a hard-core anti-illegal-immigration bill as HR 4437? Congress, without a doubt, underestimated the resolve of Latinas and Latinos to fight for our right to be visible.

But after the rallies of Saturday, March 25, the entire United States—as well the rest of the world, for it became a major international news item—has taken notice. And what especially moved me were the photographs of the enormous crowd—half a million strong and all dressed in white—that attended the Los Angeles protest.

We’ve ceased being invisible.

Unquestionably, the issue of immigration still has to be dealt with. But now representatives from the entire political spectrum of the Latino and Latina communities will be included in the dialog. (This had not happened before.) And those in a hurry to close down the border will have to wait patiently until a consensus on a humane immigration policy has been reached.

The past couple of weeks, the US press has commented that a “sleeping giant” has been awakened.

But we’ve never been asleep. Not really.

I believe it would be more accurate to say that we’ve finally cast off the cloak.