Are Events in Egypt Passé for Latinos?

I don’t think so, but I would ask, what’s your  measure?

A blogger in the DC area was incensed recently that he saw no Latinos at an anti-Mubarak protest in front of the White House.

Roland Roebuck, a self-described Afro-Latino wrote in Metrolatinonews.com, “I scanned the area, to see if by chance I could see one Latino expressing solidarity but to my disappointment, they were invisible. My assumption is that since this protest did not deal with the nagging issue of “immigration” many of our Hispanics decided to sit this one out. Many in our Latino community don’t see their connection with this revolution and a large segment of them are not even aware that Egypt is located on the African Continent.”

Whether that’s true or not is not my point. I’m interested in another idea, apropos of protests against dictators in general. Is it possible that Latinos, recent immigrants specifically, are unmoved by the events in Egypt because of their own history with thug dictators? Could it be that the scenes of the protests in Cairo are not exceptional to them?

A few things to consider:  How many anti-Mubarak protests have there been in the US? Enough to gauge specific ethnic or cultural sentiment and solidarity? What is that number, 10 protests, 100? Are Latinos any less visibly moved by the standoff in Egypt than any other American community? What exactly do we want solidarity to look like?

And here’s something else, in our age of digital, global communications could it be that it’s the protests that are passé? If I’m tuned-in to the events on my laptop screen and can easily click my way to action-donations, spreading information-that have repercussions on the other side of the world, why take up a banner and march in front of the White House?

It would seem to me that the opposite is true. I think Latinos feel a kinship in struggle with the Egyptian protesters. Beginning at the border with Mexico and running all the way to south America, be it because of drug cartels, military juntas or dictator thugs, there is a history of a common struggle against oppression.

The immigration protests of the recent past in the United States brought millions of Latinos to the streets of major cities. There is no doubt Latinos can mobilize, given the right motive and circumstance. But this is different; it’s almost other-worldly. Latinos are no less engaged than all other Americans. What happens, I think, is that there is a watershed moment, a tipping point if you will, where events become unbearable in silence. The father from home that the events happen, the higher the threshold for action.  We haven’t reached that point, in general, in America. But it occurs to me that, because of their experience, some Latinos may be reaching that point before the rest of us.