Open Letter to Donald Trump: Grow a Pair

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco

Dear Donald (I hope you don’t mind my calling you Donald),

You’d think, given your constant complaints about “the system being rigged,” that the Latino community would have a little more sympathy for you. We don’t, most of us.

I don’t speak for the entire U.S. Latino community – it’s too big and too varied for any one person to do that. But when it comes to you I think most Latinos in the U.S. are in agreement – we don’t like what you stand for, we don’t like the public you. I know you know that, despite your A personality, über extroverted, winning-confidence assertion. I know you know that just because you say something with confidence doesn’t make it true – so no, the Latinos don’t love you.

The fact that you dissed Mexicans from the get-go, back when you started your presidential campaign, was just a spark. That began our dislike of you, and I have to give you credit for doing something I can’t, you got almost every Latino to unite and identify as Mexican because a great majority of us know that when you said Mexican you meant all of us. And yes, your surrogates make a distinction, saying that you meant only undocumented immigrants. But only your most ardent followers swallow that line, they’re prone to you.

We’re not. Prone to you. When you joyously harassed the President of the United States demanding to see his papers, we heard what you were saying because it’s part of our American experience. Some white folks, those in the mainstream media, called it birtherism, dog whistle rhetoric. But we heard it loudly and clearly – I’m not going to waste my time justifying Latinos’ place in the American mainstream, it’s a thriving thing and that’s all you need to know.

It’s also central to what you should understand about us. We’ve taken our place in the United States despite the system being rigged against us.  But unlike you, we don’t whine about it. We’ve organized, we’ve come together for generations, one battle at a time, one obstacle at a time, one job, one university degree, one new business, one new dream at a time.

It hasn’t always looked pretty – I know you have a penchant for large gilded things with your name on them, it’s not like that. And many of our struggles have been faced in courtrooms – I know you understand that, although our legal battles are in the defense of a community, not against perceived personal attacks. Other battles have been fought in the voting booth – you’re beginning to see what that’s about, but I doubt you’ve ever been denied your right to vote, or had to organize fundraisers so people in your community could pay the required poll tax. Our grandparents did.

Yes, the system is rigged when schools are not equally funded so that affluent kids in affluent schools get a leg-up simply because of the random chances of birth and not because of aptitude. It’s rigged when business owners can’t get bank loans because their race, culture or ethnicity, or the location of their business, is considered a risk. The same goes for mortgages, car loans, credit cards. It’s rigged when law enforcement assumes you are a danger to them, for reasons I still don’t understand. It’s rigged when many non-Latinos see us and assume we’re undocumented, uneducated, and on welfare just because of the way we look. It’s rigged because it has been, for a long time, because “that’s the way things are done. ‘ We’ve been lynched, our land stolen, our rights taken and our future threatened. But we don’t whine.

I’ll put this as plainly as I think you will understand. Donald, quit your whining and grow a pair. You don’t sound very manly when you do that, and I know how much you value your manliness.

Grow a pair, put your shoulder to the grind (and I mean you, not someone you pay to do it) and work through it.

The system is rigged you say? Of course it is, it always has been, but you’ve been on the easy side of it. So you don’t get to complain.

Call this free, friendly advice. If you want respect in the Latino community, man-up. I know you know what I mean.

Good luck, you’ll need it.