Miami Latinos are on a mission: rooting out parents’ racism
Since the police killing of George Floyd in late May, young white, brown, and Black Latinos in Miami have started more forcefully engaging their older relatives in conversations about racial justice.
Since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, a diverse cross-section of Miamians has mobilized to demand racial justice in near-daily protests. But support for protesters’ message against systemic racism and police brutality hasn’t been universal.
Last month, several events, ranging from caravans to rallies, took place in response to the civil unrest over Floyd’s murder, drawing support from some Cuban and Venezuelan exiles, among others, and unleashing intense conversations about the generational
divide coloring the Hispanic community’s racial reckoning.
Among the most widely discussed counter-protests was a mid-June gathering of about 100 in Miami Lakes, where demonstrators waved large American flags, voiced support for President Donald Trump, and raised “All Lives Matter” banners.
The social media chatter in response to that event reflected a phenomenon that has been taking place in multi-generational Latino households since late May, as younger family members have started to more forcefully engage their older relatives in conversations about racial justice.
‘MOM, WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT’S GOING ON?’
For Melissa Miranda, a 28-year-old white Cuban American, the social movement ignited by Floyd’s murder has stirred up memories of the “thinly veiled racism” she says was part of everyday life growing up.
“The most common thing I remember was my parents telling me that I couldn’t date a Black guy,” she said. “As a kid I didn’t think much of it; I didn’t question it because systemic racism got to me.”
After “posting a lot” about the Black Lives Matter movement as protesters surged into public spaces across South Florida, Miranda thought it important to broach the topic openly with her mother.
“I said, ‘Mom, what do you think about everything that’s going on?’”
Though Miranda’s mother said she had seen and was saddened by the video of Floyd’s murder, her biggest concern were reports of violence and looting happening at some protests nationwide, including on May 30 in Miami.
“I tried to discuss with her the reasons that people might be doing this; people are fed up, this has been going on for years and years and nothing has changed,” said Miranda. “She was like, ‘I understand that, but I still don’t think it’s right that people are looting and rioting.’
She just seemed to be more outraged about that part and that’s what she focused on.”
Images of looting — which some say received disproportionate amounts of coverage on Spanishlanguage media — were also something Yanivel López had to address in conversation with her parents, who emigrated from Venezuela in 1990. López, 27, described her family as brown-skinned.
“They associated the [Black Lives Matter] movement with the looting. In my house, Univision is playing all day pretty much, and that’s what was being covered,” she said. “A lot of older Venezuelans are like, ‘There are Venezuelan socialists at the protests,’ or ‘It’s antifa.’ It was work to get my parents to see past all of that.”
For Miranda, bringing up the topic of the protests kick-started a wide-ranging, multi-day conversation about the history of police brutality in the United States, and what she sees as the need to usher in sweeping police reform. To boost her argument, Miranda showed her mother a video of a Fort Lauderdale police officer shoving a kneeling woman to the ground during a May 31 protest, which ultimately resulted in the dismissal and a misdemeanor battery charge for the officer.
“She said, ‘That’s so wrong, she wasn’t doing anything.’ So it was like, OK, I’m getting through to her,” said Miranda.
At her mother’s prompting, Miranda also delved into the systemic forces at play behind the United States’ Black-white economic divide.
“She asked me, ‘Why can’t Black people get out of poverty? Every race experiences poverty, it’s not unique to anybody.’ I was really thrown off. I was like, ‘Where do I even start?’” Miranda said. “I tried to explain redlining; I tried to explain the prison industrial complex. It’s a lot to go over.”
Miranda’s explanations were met with an open mind.
“As I was explaining those things I could see the gears turning in her head. She was taking everything in; she didn’t interrupt me; she wasn’t arguing back. It seemed like she was in a place of trying to understand,” Miranda said. “I considered it progress.”
More than a month after Miami’s short-lived night of violence, car-burning, and confrontations between demonstrators and police in heavy riot gear, Miranda’s mother, Marlen, said she still “doesn’t understand or agree with the way many people went about protesting … I don’t agree with violence”; but she credits recent conversations with her daughter for giving her a more nuanced understanding of the movement playing out on the streets.
“[Talking with her] made me see many things in a new light. … Through her I learned about what’s motivating the Black Lives Matter protests, and I learned about the discrimination Black people faced throughout history,” she said. “Thanks to [my daughter] I learned many, many things I didn’t know before.”
LOST IN TRANSLATION AND ‘THE MIAMI BUBBLE’
Though Miranda speaks Spanish at home — her mother speaks only “a little bit of English” — her grasp of the language can be tenuous.
“My Spanish is very broken, so having this complicated, very emotional conversation was difficult because my voice was shaking, I was nervous. I wanted to get this right because I’ve never had a conversation like this with my mom and I wanted to say the right words and convey my message,” Miranda said.
“She was willing to listen but I was nervous that it would take away the credibility of what I’m saying because I’m stuttering, because I’m tripping over my words. But I don’t think it did.”
López, meanwhile, feels more confident speaking Spanish. But she says that English terms widely used in relation to racial justice often don’t have clean-cut Spanish equivalents.
“It’s challenging when you are trying to speak about systemic racism or the militarization of the police in Spanish,” she said. “It’s terms that we all know but that can sound awkward in translation. I just try to keep things as simple as possible.”
Miami-Dade’s demographics— nearly 70% of residents are Hispanic, according to Census figures — also adds a layer of complexity to the discussion.
“The environment here is super Venezuelan,” said López, who lives in Doral. “All my parents’ friends are Venezuelan, and that means that, if they have encountered racism here, it’s only happened a handful of times. We are the majority here, so it’s hard for anybody if you are the majority to put yourself in the shoes of someone else.”
Miranda agrees.
“Every person my age that I talk to, we all complain about the same thing: ‘the Miami bubble, the Miami bubble.’ We are protected to some degree by the fact that a majority of this city is Hispanic,” she said. “And I don’t think our older Hispanic community understands that. They would probably be targets of racism and prejudice too, the moment they step out of Miami.”
COMPARING U.S. POLICE RESPONSE TO AUTHORITARIANISM AT HOME
In her conversations with older Venezuelan relatives and family friends, López has been trying to garner support for the Black Lives Matter movement in part by drawing parallels between police reaction to protests in the U.S. and security response to mass demonstrations in Venezuela.
“It’s like, what’s the difference? Why is police brutality and oppression bad there but fine here?” she said. “You can’t look at the two situations and say they are opposite; it’s hypocritical. One government is left-leaning, one government is right-leaning, but the authoritarianism is the same.”
In López’s experience, older Venezuelans bristle at that comparison — and also have trouble accepting the prevalence of systemic racism in the U.S. — because, she says, they can’t bring themselves to take a critical stance against what they see as a place of refuge.
“I saw a lot of people on Facebook sharing a post
that said, ‘No cuenten conmigo para hablar mal de
este país.’ ‘Don’t count on me to speak ill of this country,’” she said. “It’s this thing where they come here and they feel like they owe this country everything and they can never criticize anything about it.”
“These same people will talk your ear off about Venezuela, or Cuba, or wherever they are from, but here, they are happy to just accept the status quo,” she added. “We actually want to make this country better.”
Nahomi Matos Rondón, 23, is an Afro-Latina community organizer with family ties to both the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
She said imported, idealistic views about what the U.S. represents have also held back some of her family members from engaging in conversations about the struggle for racial justice in this country.
“There is this perception that this is where order and law exist so in order to have these conversations, you have to break down the idea of what this place means for us, and that’s where things can get a little dicey,” she said. “When you’ve been sold your entire life that here everything is fair, to be told that isn’t really true and that the system is not meant for everyone, it messes with people’s perceptions, and they get very defensive about it. So I think that’s where a lot of the resistance comes from.”
MANY AFRO-LATINOS DON’T IDENTIFY WITH THE BLACK AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
Conversations about race, police brutality and discrimination aren’t new for Matos Rondón and her family members, all of whom are Black.
“We’ve been at this since Trayvon,” she said.
In 2012, when Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in Florida by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain of Peruvian descent, Matos Rondón was just 15 years old. “I remember when Trayvon happened it just kick-started a conversation of what Blackness means within the family.”
In the course of that ongoing conversation, Matos Rondón realized her relatives didn’t see Martin’s murder as a product of systemic racism, but rather as the consequence of being “caught slipping.” Matos Rondón’s family members applied that same analysis to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the Black medical technician who was shot in her apartment by Louisville police officers during a late-night, no-knock raid.
“It’s the same situation over and over again. They say, ‘Oh, well, they weren’t doing what they were supposed to be doing,’ or, ‘They deserved it,’” Matos Rondón said. “But it’s like, Breonna Taylor was sleeping and they blasted through her apartment. It isn’t about if you are doing things correctly or not. If it’s your turn, it’s your turn.”
At issue, Matos Rondón explained, is the fact that family members, leaning on their Latinidad, don’t identify with people like Floyd or Taylor, despite sharing the same skin color.
“For my family, even though they are Black they still need to see themselves as Black,” she said. “Everybody else sees them as Black, but they don’t because to them Black is an insult, and they can call themselves trigueño, more
no, or whatever. But they are Black.”
According to Matos Rondón, a crime like George Floyd’s murder can trigger indifference.
“They’re like, ‘Well, we are not like them … We do things by the book; we do things correctly; we mind our business,’” she said.
In response, Matos Rondón has tried to explain that her identity as a Latina wouldn’t shield her in a hypothetical altercation with a racist police officer, even if they were Hispanic as well.
“Before they do whatever they do, they are not going to ask me, ‘Wait, do you know Spanish?’ ” she said. “They don’t care that you speak Spanish, that you came from the same country that they did.”
This back-and-forth among family members can get tense with “a lot of fighting and screaming,” but Matos Rondón said that speaking up is a responsibility she takes seriously.
“When you don’t have these conversations and when you don’t put your foot down, you don’t know how low you are going to go. Sometimes, for the sake of keeping the peace a lot of things go unsaid and there’s not a lot of accountability. Everybody wants to have a good time,” she said. “But sometimes you can’t have a good time; sometimes you have to grow. It’s OK to stir the pot.”
As the weeks have ticked by since Floyd’s murder, more and more online resources have cropped up to help guide conversations about anti-racism, with many being tailored specifically to Latino and immigrant families, including a number of Instagram accounts.
Among those who have turned to digital resources over the last month is Miranda, who sent her mom YouTube videos with Spanish subtitles about “racismo
sistemático.”
Though she is encouraged by the many conversations she’s had with her mother, Miranda said other Latinos engaged in similar discussions should remember that unlearning racist views can be “a marathon, not a sprint.”
“I don’t think we should just write off our parents and say, ‘Well they are just racist and they don’t understand, they will never understand.’ I think they will, it’s just a matter of having those conversations repeatedly over time,” she said. “Just remember that it’s not going to happen overnight; you can’t dismantle generations of racism in one day. They are still learning; they are still our parents.”