America’s Largest Minority is Also Its Most Misunderstood (NY Times, 2024)
Ms. Arana is the author, most recently, of “LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority.” She is Peruvian American.
History is being made on the Rio Grande. Hundreds of thousands of migrants braved the journey across it last year, setting records and contributing to an urgent border crisis. As spectacle, it has been transfixing.
Yet misconceptions abound. It’s as if the sight of a migrant scaling a wall or wading ashore is now a Rorschach test, our Rashomon. Depending on where we sit on the political spectrum, we perceive different truths: Some see a brown “invasion,” others an unremitting drug war, a humanitarian crisis, a political failure, a symptom of societal collapse. The politicizations are legion, and the distortions dire.