To the People of the Republic:
I was born an American citizen, yet from the first steps of my professional life I was marked as something less. In classrooms, on ballfields, and in boardrooms, I was reminded not of my ability but of my difference. The questions were subtle about donkeys -about tequila, but the message was constant: I was not one of them. Success, I was told, would only come if I learned the system well enough to survive in it.
To be Mexican American in this country is to walk a double edged sword. I am not American enough to be accepted as American, and not Mexican enough to be embraced as Mexican. Even worse, I am collapsed into the word “Hispanic,” a label that flattens entire nations into a single language. To the Anglo imagination we are interchangeable, all cast as immigrants, even when we are citizens. My mother immigrated became naturalized, and the sad truth is it makes no difference that I was born here. In their eyes we remain outsiders looking in, dreaming if the day our hard work would pay off.
This nation was never structured for people like me to have a voice. The republic, defended in the Federalist essays, was not meant to expand power but to control it to contain the so-called “mob.” And who was this mob? Not the wealthy, not the powerful, but the poor. In practice, the system safeguarded the minority of elites against the majority of common citizens. It was not designed to protect the people; it was designed to protect power from the people.
That legacy remains. The same voices that dismiss us as less than American dismantle any effort to remedy discrimination. Diversity, equity, and inclusion were born of history’s proof of inequality, yet today they are recast as threats. The elite fear replacement, as if fairness itself were an attack. They change rules when rules no longer serve them. They invoke “law” when law is useful, and discard it when it is not.
I do not pretend all white men think this way. But history makes clear that wealth and power in this country have been guarded by those who do. Their project is not new. It is the same project that cast the poor as dangerous, the immigrant as unworthy, the Brown and Black as undeserving of equal claim. That is the true mob they fear: the majority that has always been excluded.
And yet, what they call threat, I call promise. For those who know struggle also know humanity. We share, we shelter, we lift one another because survival demands it. That is the real meaning of being American not wealth, not privilege, but the insistence on dignity. The irony is this: we are not the faction. We are the people.
“As they claim order, but they enforce exclusion.
This republic wasn’t founded for us.”
PEDRENUS
Surgat Populus
