Opinion
50 years after arriving from Cuba, I fear America is falling apart
By Social Links forMike Gonzalez
Published Aug. 3, 2024, 12:48 p.m. ET
This Tuesday marks half a century since I arrived on American shores, and it was love at first sight. Queens felt snug and homey from the start. The country has changed in important ways over the last five decades, in some ways better and in others worse. But America is still very much worth loving.
The fact that today we have two political camps divided by this question — love of America — would have felt strange to the kid who landed at JFK on Aug. 6, 1974, having been born in Cuba and spent two years in Spain with his family waiting for a visa. When that coveted pass finally arrived and we emigrated to New York, I found Jackson Heights full of unending possibilities.
For Mike Gonzalez, the New York he arrived to in the 1970s was a promised land of culture and conflict experienced by a wide range of races and ethnicities who somehow managed to get along.
It’s not happenstance that this election year divides us precisely on whether you love America for what it is — the Land of Opportunity, even if it could use some improvements — or if you think it’s hideously racist and oppressive, and seek to transform it. This is the result of a process that I have witnessed firsthand for 50 years and devoted decades to study.
Take the term “Hispanic,” which did not exist 50 years ago and only later did I learn I might qualify as one. That category had not yet been invented by bureaucrats at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It did not happen until 1977 with OMB Directive No. 15, and then was slapped on the Census for the first time in 1980.
https://nypost.com/2024/08/03/opinion/50-years-after-arriving-from-cuba-i-fear-america-is-falling-apart/
