Growing Up Blue in a Red State

Maybe it is a bit hyperbolic, but at this point I no longer care. This nation needs Senator Barack Obama. We just do. I will be honest I sobbed through last night's nomination speech. Roll your eyes. It's okay. I have never been and never will be one of those folks who said if Hillary won the nomination I would vote Republican. Sorry. In my mother's womb, during the bicentennial she voted Carter and I went along for the ride. Every four years I have chosen to stay on that ride. Nuestra familia has never been Republican. We are Texas Democrats surrounded by a state that has increasingly become solidly red. But every voting season, my mom would remind me why Democrats were our choice. We were mexicanas. We were working class. Republicans were not on our side. Even during the Reagan/Bush years when so many Democrats went Republican, my mom stayed blue -- Carter, Mondale, Dukakis -- she told anyone who listened about Reagan's refusal to support the UFW when he served as governor in CA. I couldn't wait until I could vote. In our small Texas town I was getting a taste of Republican family values. My own political ideology began to form.
Since I was a kid, my mother had idolized figures such as JFK, RFK, MLKJr. and Cesar Chavez. In high school, I had teachers who proudly told me that they had never voted for Kennedy. They had cast their votes for Nixon in the 1960 election. When they assigned presentations, they would tell me to sit down after I spoke, remarking that it was unbelievable a Mexican could do better than white students. When the 1994 gubernatorial election came, we were all introduced to George W. Bush, and he won. He had Mexican nieces and nephews his family called the little brown ones.
Years later when I got into graduate school at the University of Texas, professors at West Texas were in disbelief and one actually said it. A girl like you is going to have a hard time in grad school. You would be better-suited in a school that's not so prestigious. Maybe. Thank God, I didn't try for the Ivy League. Then after I got my MA at UT, I went back to Amarillo and taught ESL where the students were older men and women, and their children were still punished for speaking their language (Spanish, Lao, Vietnamese) in school. We even had a case where a mother was sent to court for child abuse because she spoke Spanish to her child in public.
How many times during this primary campaign did we hear all the code words for racism -- hard-working, traditional, blue-collar. At one point, David Gergen of CNN wondered aloud why Senator Hillary Clinton didn't refuse the votes of racists. At one point it was clear that some of the votes she was getting was simply based on race. She even said it herself. So why not reject those votes? Admit that the Democratic Party is changing. To me, that is what I see when it is possible that Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, and Virginia might all go Democrat for the first time in decades and not because a white southerner is running, but because a person of color is running. It means the Democratic party is no longer a party of white southerners -- it's the party it has been evolving into for decades -- a party of diversity. This is what this primary season has shown me.
This is why I tear up almost every time I see Senator Barack Obama speak. Because for the first time I think we might have a leader who knows the experience of being a person of color in this country -- someone who knows what it means to have nothing expected of you and yet exceed everyone's highest expectations.