What's With All These Conservative Latinos?
A white immigrant explains
Hey, in the spirit of not caricaturing as unfairly as I have been caricatured—I have to hand it to you, it’s pretty hard to caricature me as a right-winger, as I resent anyone who wants to demand I think a certain way in order to receive the benefits of any section of society, however beleaguered, and my only sin was being “walk away” before it was a monetizable trend—but some of you have bent all the way in a circle—ahhhhh fuck it, I’m going to caricature you after all, because I have never been able to understand the white-hot haaaaate that I’ve seen conservative minorities receive from their would-be white saviours since—Christ, ever since I started at the Chicago Reader in 2000 and the staff vengefully tortured my favorite music writer because he’s black and gay so they hired him and he turned out to be conservative, that prick. That’s a long time hating.
To be fair, though, those saviors seem to be at least as confused as I am, so I feel a certain kinship.
Maybe that’s where the race-tinged hate is coming from—confusion.
Be honest: Have you ever asked yourself, utterly bewildered, how on Earth all these Latinos could suddenly consider voting for the N@zi Cheeto when we all know that means you hate immigrants?
Aside from their failure to understand that you, as a white leftist who went to college, know what’s good for them, much better than they ever could—ESPECIALLY if they also went to college, since clearly they are unteachable—don’t they, like, y’know, want people who LOOK LIKE THEM to surround them on every side so they feel better, wow, that’s some interesting projection? Don’t they care about their tribe?
Well, I’m a white lady and an immigrant, so maybe you can stretch your imagination far enough to see things from my perspective.
Also, the place I’ve moved to, from the US, is France, so there’s fancy food with little potato puffs and wine lists and Chanel and stuff, so do I have your attention?
So!— if you think the evil, privileged native populations of the handful of nations that have been juggling waves of immigrants from everyplace on Earth that envy and television sets can be found, are mean and tiny about immigrants behaving badly—you should hear the complaints from the other immigrants!
Today I was riding the famous Paris Métro, the crown jewel of the City of Lights, which the native French now increasingly avoid in favour of their individual privilege-mobiles due to exactly the kind of fun I had on there today.
I was minding my own business on the platform, coming home from a swim in a crowded but comparatively warm-for-the-current-year municipal pool—don’t get me started on what the energy crisis has done to public recreation—when somebody tapped me on the back to bother me. Foolishly, I removed my headphones.
I’m not sure whether the man who accosted me was white, Arab, or South American—sorry if you’re curious, but I’m not pretending to be color-blind, I’m face-blind, thanks to the Asperger’s, so if you could knock off the hypocritical ableism whilst crusading for the little people under my boot that would be nice—but he was CLEARLY intoxicated. However, he “helpfully” informed me that my backpack was open and perhaps inviting pickpockets.
Normal people in France will do this when your backpack is in fact open, because they’re almost suffocatingly nice and friendly if you know the language, and yeah some of them are kind of busybodies.
This person must have noticed this custom; however, when I looked and saw that, no, my backpack wasn’t actually open, the zipper merely wasn’t meeting by about half an inch, I was filled with dread, because it didn’t take long for me to figure out how this lovely Gallic custom had been twisted in his warped, entitled mind: He had done me a SERVICE, and now I owed him MONEY so he could get drugs.
Now, if I had enough money for drugs, maybe I would like to be on drugs, does that thought never occur to people?!
So he called me greedy. Well, aside from the fact that he was asking ME for money, not the other way round, and had apparently dumped himself on everyone’s doorstep expecting to be cared for like a child, I tried to explain to him that A. I had no change because nobody carries change nowadays, and B. I had no change because my French husband doesn’t give me enough spending money to hand it out to everyone, and while I realise I am a grown woman and it’s 2023 and I should be able to go get plenty of money—then again, so could my interlocutor—said husband also forgot to file the work permit papers with which I entrusted him, and in the interval between our making this mistake (my mistake being, trusting someone else with something that important; his being, expecting a government to make things easy)… blah, blah, blah:
I quickly realised his command of the local language was limited to the backpack scam and insults.
He started screaming “sale française” (French bitch), then proceeded to impotently try to bitchslap me while whining at the top of what was left of his lungs about oh wallah, oh why did he come to this awful country full of greedy people, blah blah blah… noticing that my fighting stance meant business, he backed off slightly, then tried to incite a random group of black and North African schoolboys to attack me and help get “his” money; they looked on confused.
Fortunately, he finally noticed the Métro employee stalking toward us and darted away, so I didn’t have to get myself in trouble kicking him in the head.
But I can still feel my heart racing, hours later, and now the gap between how I feel about Chicago and how I feel about Paris is, once again, sadly growing smaller.
Immigrants are the first to face violence from rotten immigrants; as I said, most of the French are huddled in their cars now. My neighbourhood, my transit—every public area I have to traverse is full of “people like me” who simultaneously direct their own hate towards me whilst making me a target of the larger population’s ire. I used to make friends here easily, but now everyone is full of suspicion.
It ticks me off, since I’ve done everything I could—I’m pretty much a model immigrant, outside of that paperwork my husband never filed and my unfortunate racial privilege as a European-American. I became fluent in the language via sheer interest, an outdated textbook in an underfunded rural high school, one good teacher, having no friends, and hyperlexia; I went on to get a French degree in my 30s after a career in newspapers, studying Latin in Montpellier with French as the language of instruction. I was the first person to translate Octave Mirbeau’s lost masterpiece In the Sky into English, and I’ve been amongst the first English-language reviewers of pro-French writers like Alain Finkielkraut and Michel Houellebecq; I can even spell their names.
And yet immigrating here has been a foul Dadaist labyrinth for me—despite having a French spouse, fluency in the language and the culture, being a bloody translator, and I the fact that can belt out the Marseillaise AND the Star Spangled Banner in two and a half breaths—due to the timing.
Our mistake with the paperwork should have been easy to correct—except the office to which we were directed in order to rectify it suddenly closed without notifying us, as part of a crackdown; we waited for six months to find my dossier floating somewhere near Alpha Centauri, winking out in a blink of Napoleonic radiation, stamped “rejected” by a delighted bureaucrat looking forward to a long, paid vacation whilst awaiting another post.
Indeed, one of Napoleon’s less delightful legacies has been the infamous French bureaucracy, with its love not only for paperwork, but for making you start your paperwork all over.
It was legendary to begin with. However, neither of us—not I during my prior immigration process as a student, nor he when he naturalised his first wife—have ever encountered anything remotely like this; they are surreptitiously twisting the knife, wasting your time, setting up catch-22s—clearly in the hopes that one will give up and go home.
Even if “going home” would mean either abandoning my spouse or forcing him to live in a country he thinks is fun to visit, but no thanks as to staying there.
The worst part is, I can completely understand their point of view. Unfathomable numbers of people are jumping their borders looking for a free government handout, and maybe a cracker to stab. The French have been unbelievably generous for generations—it’s just my luck that I would get married to a citizen at the exact same time when their patience has finally snapped.
I put in the work, learned the language, fell in love with a citizen, left my country, dragged my poor cat over an ocean—all whilst feeling an appropriate degree of love for the land, the culture, the people, and most of all the incredible depth of history. People here might make fun of Americans for being mesmerised by all the old buildings, but come on look at it—that thing is a thousand years old! A THOUSAND!!! That one’s TWO thousand and it’s still tall, LOOK AT IT!!!
But there are too many people who are like me superficially—they might not all be my same race, but come to think of it, not all South Americans have the same genetic background—as foreigners, but they are not here for love.
Some are here for money, whilst others—I’m thinking specifically of those individuals from the Magrebh who remember the part where France colonised their countries, whilst not remembering that the reason the French crown was able to get the populace to go along with this unprofitable plan is because it promised the little people this would mean stopping the PIRATES from the Magrebh from STEALING THEM off French shores and ENSLAVING THEM, but there are also Polish people here who hate the French—are here for historical revenge.
And I’m standing like a dope in the crossfire, with my copy of Camus under my arm and my thumb up my ass, pleading: “But we’re not all like that!” and being told shut up, back of the line, you’re not even diverse, we can’t trust you, sneaky-pants, go home.
We all get thrown in the same basket. Is it fair? Hell no. I don’t even get whatever drugs that guy was on. But… how else are the French going to deal with it? If they try to divide immigrants based on our command of the language, certain people are going to speak the universal language of burning shit down and killing people, as they have been doing at such a high rate lately, again and again and again and again and again.
Not only do I get lumped in with the haters, the haters use the leverage of implied violence to get better treatment than I do.
So… how can I look at your illegal-immigrant-hating, hard-working, English-speaking Cuban-American neighbour who groans every time he sees someone “like him” fucking up on the news, and tell you with a straight face that he doesn’t actually hate his own family?
If you need me to spell out that conclusion at this point, maybe he’s not the one who can’t be taught.
I’d have translated “sale française” as “dirty Frenchwoman.” French slang has always been a mystery to me.
My small but proud win at work this week was correcting a well-known historian’s misspelling of Houellebecq.
This comment is, of course, in the context of Aug 30, 2024. Nine plus months since you posted this. My how things have escalated and changed in that time - globally.
"Sale française" - I'm glad you took liberties. My brain added a superior French accent to the dialogue, which fit the feel of the story - until I remembered that it was an immigrant cocking his bitch slapping trebuchet and why would a Frenchman need to add the "French woman" qualifier.
Reminded me of Brook's "Schwanzstucker".
Anyway, this reminded me of my years in Germany, where "the ugly American" (UA if you will) was alive and well and F'd things up for the rest of us. Like the French, you couldn't really blame them for loathing and disdaining the outsiders - especially since they were extensions of the original occupation force. Many older Duetschen were young kids back then and remembered not so great times. However, during that time they save their greatest disdain for the auslander from Russia. However, middle eastern, Africans and Turks were just a rung below them.
Here's the thing though and I've found this in all countries I've been to (interestingly with France being the exception - several day trips), that when they saw you were making an attempt at assimilating, their levels of tolerance and acceptance climbed dramatically.
I might have attributed the leeway to the ubiquitous petro-dollar before it's recent demise, but the UA's were making it rain also, so it had to e that the locals could see a differentiation.
I'd say - on the whole - the same applies to the ethnic immigrant groups where the locals are concerned. I do agree that the immigrants rightly take issue with their "ugly immigrants" - especially when the majority of the misbehavior is violent, criminal or sexually assaulting the women and girls.
To me the legal immigrants are the canaries in the coal mine. When they raise the bullshit flag on their illegal counterparts, then you know the natives are justifiably restless.
The caveat to all that, of course, is France.