Hispanic Heritage Month More Than A Month: Less Walls, More Doors

By: Francesca Peri Brusa and Paloma Doti

As a teenage girl, I am grateful for walls. Walls avoid conflicts. If I hide behind the walls of my room, I don't have awkward conversations with my neighbor. Thanks to cement and bricks, I can put on really loud music without no one judging or asking me to turn it down. The only opinions and music that I see are the ones that I think or that I am listening to.

(Evan Solano / For The Times; Getty Images; Michael Putland / Getty Images; Cathy Murphy / Getty Images)

I can imagine what my neighbor is going to say, the infamous " You're all grown up!" or "How's that hobby you doing?" knowing well I dropped it ten years ago. My dad will tell me how lame my music is yet I won't ever know because I hide behind the walls of my room. My door works just as well as a wall, the difference, I can open it. One day, I did.

I realized my family wasn't that bad. They enjoyed my music taste which I thought they hated and for my neighbor they were pretty cool. Maybe the only thing I had to do was to open a door.

Between Mexico and the USA, there is also also a wall. The USA asked for it. It seems like they also are annoyed by their neighbors. When you are alone

in your room, it's easy to imagine your neighbor is going to be mean and annoying, understandable. However, for them it seems like being Hispanic is a sin. We are perceived to be born with big mustaches and heavy gold chains and are ready to climb walls rather than be "contained" as the average white American citizen.

Hispanic Heritage Month is a period that celebrates and recognizes the contribution of Hispanic people in the USA. However, it's odd to celebrate a holiday where the English-speaking media makes us believe Hispanic people can either be hourglass women who are loud and materialistic, illegal immigrants who are coming to steal your job, uneducated dropouts who are just lazy, or criminals who sell drugs.

The truth is much more complicated. Although recently there has been more Hispanic representation, the stereotyping of Hispanic people in the media keeps dissolving our individual identities and diversity. It reduces us to flat characters whose only personality trait is being Hispanic. Nationality is just one more part of our individual identity. It seems that when Hollywood screenwriters think of Latin Americans, we are all on the beach, talking with exotic accents, tanned and with thick dark hair, and fighting against nature so that we can kill and eat

animals in cold blood. Latinos live in straw huts, isolated from amazing capitalism. We don't need careers, we live one day at a time. Oh and I almost forgot about the music. Latinos dance, sing and breathe salsa, right?

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Our identities are all the same: Mexicans, Uruguayans, and Chileans, they all celebrate el Cinco de mayo! And despite the fact that Bolivia doesn´t have a sea, they sure are dancing Caribbean salsa on the beach all day long. And of course, Argentina is hot all year, without counting what we call “El fin del Mundo” (the end of the world), a province that is the southernmost place of the world, meaning, is cold. Very cold.

There is not only one way to be Hispanic. The word Hispanic simply deals with people who speak Spanish, which excludes dialects, culture, history, social classes, races, ethnicities, nationalities, religions, shapes, and sizes. For example, if one thinks about the USA, one cannot say that people from New York and people from Florida are the same because they are almost 1000 miles away; it wouldn't make sense. Then, why does it apply to Hispanic people? Why do we think that Mexicans are the same as Argentinians if they are 4950 miles apart?

Latino Americans can be bookworms who crave academic validation, dedicated workers who made their own fortune by working harder than everyone else, dedicated parents, loving partners, and so much more. The media feeds us an inaccurate representation that may not be untrue, but it is incomplete. That is the problem: as it is the only story being told, it becomes the only one, and that is extremely harmful to both Hispanic and American people who can learn from each other. We need to exchange stereotypical, Hispanic characters, with characters with deep identities who just happen to be Hispanic.

In order to fully celebrate Hispanic Americans, stereotyping and demonizing need to stop, and this can only be done by starting up conversations that inspire change.

Let's open our doors and talk to our neighbors.