• 
• CLASS
• JOBS
• AUTO
• HOMES

This is where I came from

CHICAGO — All columnists get to experience the joy of getting nice letters from readers and the agony of getting angry mail over even the slightest of slights. I once got a very lengthy and passionate letter from a professional clown taking me to task for implying that contemporary children don’t care for clowns’ circus antics.

But one of the perils of being a syndicated columnist with a Hispanic surname is the unrelenting volume of hate mail that comes through. It’s usually related to specific immigration or cultural issues I might have written about, but often it’s just general anger at my very existence.

Just a few days ago I got this gem, typical of the genre: “A NUMBER OF READERS ACROSS THE COUNTRY ARE BECOMING NAUSEOUS WHEN READING YOUR CONTINUOUS RACIST VIEWS. IT JUST AGAIN SHOWS ‘YOU PEOPLE’ DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS COUNTRY. YOU JUST WANT IT TO BE LIKE WHEREVER YOU LATINOS CAME FROM.”

I’ll spare you the rest, which suggested that I leave the United States and take my fellow countrymen with me so as to open up the jobs and the “free rides” that deserving Americans are being shut out of because of “my” people.

Angry letter writers always seem to want me to “go back home,” and because I was born in Chicago and continue to live there, I’m always happy to be able to oblige them.

So when a new poll by the National Hispanic Media Coalition and the polling firm Latino Decisions found that more than 30 percent of non-Hispanics believe a majority of Hispanics are illegal immigrants, my only shock was that the percentages weren’t higher.

Along the same lines, 51 percent of non-Latinos think “welfare recipient” describes Latinos “very” or “somewhat” well, 50 percent think of Hispanics as “less educated” and 44 percent believe Hispanics “refuse to learn English.” In the real world, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, only 37 percent of all U.S. Hispanics are actual immigrants, and only about 18 percent live here illegally. And 65 percent of all U.S. Hispanics ages 5 and older either speak only English at home or speak English very well.

I’ve probably cited the statistic about language acquisition about a million times, and I won’t mind citing it another million times more. I’ve got a far rosier view of the alarming anti-Hispanic statistics than most in that I have faith that repeating the correct information over and over will eventually overpower the ridiculous misperceptions.

Sure, they’re painful. But the very fact that there are organizations in place working to quantify—and change—how entertainment and news media portray Hispanics speaks to the progress that’s already being made.

And, though it usually irks me when Latino pundits self-servingly throw around the “trillion-dollar Hispanic consumer buying power” factoid, it’s a reality that is already changing the opportunities that Hispanics are getting in media and entertainment in concrete and visible ways.

Progress can’t come fast enough for those of us who bear the brunt of being accused of not belonging here because of where our parents came from or how our names sound. But patience is key.

In another few decades when the number of Hispanics in the U.S. is no longer news—nor frightening to anyone—we’ll look back on these misunderstandings and be surprised at how long it has been since someone asked us if we speak English or when we’re going back to Mexico.

Esther Cepeda is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Her email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com.