Anecdote

When I was only four years old, my parents decided that I was going to move to Miami. Living there wasn't so hard due to the fact that nearly 57% of Miami Dade's population is hispanic. This made living there much much easier. It was pretty easy to communicate knowing little english and life honestly wasn't so different than in Bogotá. Life was quite chillin if it hadn't been for one small thing...

Whenever we had any type of governmental hearing to either get our residency cards or our visas checked or whatever, my mother and father would always pray to lord baby Jesus that we would not have some douchebag latin guy have to care for us. Although this may sound surprising, it was always the Colombian immigration worker that would put on his little fancy immigration badge and think he was the shit making us wait for hours. It was always the Bolivian or Venezuelan agent that would feel that his position at the US Immigration Agency gave him some type of permission to treat us like drug-dealing thieves. We would spend hours sitting in those uncomfortable waiting room chairs just waiting for the pedantic and hotheaded latino agents to finally realize that we weren't bad people. They, being latino and all, felt that they were something superior. They felt that for some reason the fact that they had been able to become official US government agents made them special and gave them permission to treat us, their true countrymen, like crap.

Anyways, this reminds me in Song of Solomon of the part where they talk about how Macon Dead tells Mrs. Bains that she needed to pay her rent or else she and her sons would end up living on the street. When asked by her sons what Macon Dead said, Mrs. Bains replies, "A nigger in business is a terrible thing to see. A terrible, terrible thing to see" (Morrison 22). At first when I read this I said to myself like, "Yo, what the hell, this poor guy is only doing his job. Why does she have to be such a mean lady and say that about the poor man." But then I remembered those snobbish assholes in their uniforms and honestly, I feel for this lady...