I wrote this Houston Post column some 28 years ago. I post it here to show how, sadly, things haven’t changed very much when it comes to race relations in this country. — JRP

HISPANICS, SAY THE letters to the editor, want everything handed to us by the courts. We don’t want to work for our rewards as do other segments of American society. 

They ignore efforts by groups such as the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project to register people to vote and get them to the polls. And when the leaders of these groups appear before the City Council or a judge to demand a fair shot at the system, they are automatically dismissed as “a handful” of activists out to benefit themselves. 

Others tell us that Hispanics are lazy, that we want to come to this country to get on food stamps and other forms of welfare. 

These people conveniently ignore that it is we who pick the vegetables that make it to their tables. It is we who take care of their babies and clean their houses. It is we who keep their hotels and restaurants running. It is we who keep their streets clean and pick up the garbage. It is we who build their houses in office buildings. It is we who wash their cars – most of it at miserable minimum wages, or worse. 

You Hispanics don’t vote, some tell us, so you have no right to demand anything. When we do well, we’re told we don’t vote in large enough numbers. And when we do vote in large enough numbers, they say we don’t cast educated votes because we vote only for the Hispanic candidates.

It’s OK to carve out districts to protect Republican and Democratic incumbents, but it’s not OK to carve out Hispanic district. Overlooked is the fact, of course, that people always have voted to have their own kind represent them in government. Anglos have voted for Anglos, Italians have voted for Italians, Jews for Jews, Irish for Irish, blacks for blacks, and so on. 

But when our time comes to send a person to Congress, the state Senate or the City Council, we are called racist because we want to send one of our own. White people who would sooner lop off their hands and cast a vote for a nonwhite suddenly find themselves qualified to lecture us on tolerance. Still others say that Hispanics don’t want to be part of American society. We would rather speak our foreign language then learn English, and we want the rest of society to learn Spanish to communicate with us. 

Other leaders have causes and are described as impassioned or committed men and women of vision. Our leaders aren’t allowed to have causes. Instead, they have “their own agenda” and they are described as “self-appointed,” shrill or strident. 

They love to talk about their ancestors who came over from Germany or Italy and wisely realized they had to learn English to make it in this country, as if we’re too dumb to realize the same thing – as if most of us aren’t doing just that. Most of us speak English. Most of us don’t need bilingual education and bilingual ballots and bilingual signs. 

But as long as people from Mexico and other parts of Latin America keep coming here – yes, to do all those jobs most Americans find beneath them – there will be people who will need some extra help to get along. Is it too much to ask for a bit of tolerance to make their transition easier than it was for some of us who did not have such benefits? 

THE POINT I’M trying to make, folks, is that it’s getting very tiresome, listening to all this nonsensical and hysterical reaction every time we demand a little fairness and justice. 

We understand that some of you are tired of this whole minorities mess and are frustrated that life ain’t as easy as it used to be when we knew our place. We can only response that fatigue is no justification for tolerating inequalities. We too are tired. We’re tired of being told to wait, to constantly wait. We’ve been very patient. 

It’s getting tiresome, listening to the childish refrain that if we don’t like the way things are, we should go back to where we came from, or that we have no right to complain because our life here is better than wherever we used to call home. 

I hate to break it to those of you who are still living in the 19th century, but we are home. For many of us this is where we came from, and for the rest of us, we are home because we chose to make this our home, just as your ancestor did. 

We are here to stay and there’s going to be more of us every year, so you might as well get used to it. We can all either learn to live with each other and accommodate each other’s needs, or we will end up with that fragmented nation everybody keeps predicting.