Solidarity in Diversity

In honor of my ancestry, I am compelled to call out my response to the Latino outpouring of symbolic unity at the Super Bowl last night.

Let me preface by saying that I have never invested time, money, or focus on pop culture aside from the anti-war, love and peace era of folk and rock and roll. I am not the person to ask about the latest greatest movies, music, clothing styles, or any other ‘fad’. I do not watch football, baseball or other sports. But the show of solidarity last night brought tears to me.

I look for deep roots of truth in life, in death, and beyond. I am witnessing that depth in Minnesota, on the playing field last night, in the Palestinian liberation movement, in Ukraine, in the language and cultural renaissance occurring among tribal nations in this continent, and among people of color everywhere.

I was raised by a father who knew of discrimination. He was born of both Irish potato blight immigration roots as well as Spanish colonialization roots in New Mexico. His Spanish heritage sometimes led to people calling him a Coyote, so we were taught to be aware and sensitive to prejudice.

My parents were among the first to form a chapter of the NAACP in my home town. I remember going to meetings with them and noticing we were the minority in the room. I also remember marching for MLK after his death and singing ‘We Shall Overcome’.

I remember singing that loudly in the dining room with my mother at her assisted living facility in Florida when she was 88 years. It was the morning that the election results were announced that Barack Obama had won the election for the presidency. I reminded Mom that none of us would be celebrating the election of a man of color as president of the US had she not stood strongly for diversity and inclusion

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My father hired a man at Miami University who was one of the first to ‘come out’ openly about his choice for a same sex life partnership. My father struggled with this but overcame his own prejudice to welcome this man and his partner to our home, and to travel with us to Brazil.

Which leads me to another deep root in my life. My father was a founding member of an organization called The Partners for the Americas. It was started in the 1960’s by JFK and was a people-to-people exchange to support cross-cultural understanding and affinity. He initiated a program called the Parana-Ohio program, creating multiple connections between citizens in the southern state of Brazil called Parana, and the state of Ohio. Part of the program included student exchanges between the Universidad Federal de Parana and Miami University.

My parents and I traveled to Curitiba, the capital of Parana, over a number of years during the summer months of Ohio (winter in Parana), and we hosted Brazilian students in Oxford, Ohio during their summer, our winter. We almost always had a Brazilian student living with us.

When I was 17, I took a trip to South America alone, stopping first in Peru, then on to Chile where my brother’s wife’s family lived, followed by a trip to Curitiba. When my flight from Lima to Santiago landed, I was met by men in uniform holding large rifles, who came up to me on the tarmac and ‘escorted’ me to an inner room at the airport with no explanation. This was in 1974, during the first year of the Pinochet dictatorship, during the height of the ‘Desaparecidos’ era when thousands were disappearing, taken to the stadium and mass murdered for their political views.

At the time, I was not so afraid, as I was incensed with prideful anger, “How dare they? I’m an American! My government will not abandon me. They better let me go!”

Looking back on this, and considering what is happening in our own nation these days, I am recognizing how naïve I was, and have been, believing that our nation understood alliances and cross-cultural sharing as values to create world peace. I have always been proud of our supposed shared value of diversity, a country that is a ‘melting pot’ of cultures, religious freedom, and racial justice.

So let me be loud and clear. I stand for diversity and inclusion. I stand for my LGBQT friends. I stand for my Latino friends. I stand for my BIPOC friends. I stand for Women’s Rights. I stand for liberation of ALL people EVERYWHERE from hierarchical power-over others.