Gatekeeping and Deportation

On Latinidad, fear, and who gets to belong

I saw this meme recently — a hand-drawn fortress surrounded by moat after moat, each layer marked with a rejection:

You don’t speak Spanish.

You weren’t born in Latin America.

You left as a kid.

You don’t look Latino.

At first glance, it’s funny — because it’s so painfully accurate. The meme pokes fun at the way Latino identity gets policed not by outsiders, but by members of our own communities. You see it online. You hear it in passing. You feel it when you’re asked, “But where are you really from?” and then, after you answer, the questions only multiply: Do you speak Spanish? Have you been back? How Cuban are you, really? Once I had a couple approach me in a restaurant who asked, "we've been taking bets on where you're from. Mind, settling the score for us?"

This isn’t theoretical for me. I’ve been gatekept. I’ve been asked to prove my identity in order to claim it.

I was born in Connecticut. Raised in Ithaca, New York — a small, liberal college town with a very small Latino population. My father and mother are Cuban. My face is white but a lot darker in the summer. My Spanish is halting but with a certain Castellano swagger, I like to think. I didn’t grow up immersed in the language or community. And still, I carry this identity — not as a performance, but as a truth that lives in the body and not always in the tongue.

I do my part to practice--though the community is not there. So, you know, I Duolingo every night now. I learned Spanish in Spain and it was so deeply liberating for me. Today, I read at a high school level it's getting better. I can hold a conversation, especially if you let me pause to think. Spanish is something I reach for — not because I’m trying to prove anything, but because I want to touch something that was always mine but never close enough to hold.

The most free I ever felt to explore that identity was at 22, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Romania. Far from home, far from the American gaze, I was able to sit with myself in a way I hadn’t before. I wasn’t being asked to perform Latinidad. I wasn’t being read as white or not-white or not-enough. I was foreign, period. And in that context, I found a kind of quiet autonomy — I could be Cuban-American without having to explain the hyphen.

Paradoxically, that was also the most American I’ve ever felt. Not in a nationalist sense, but in the way I was perceived. I came from a powerful country. I had the blue passport. I carried the privilege that comes with that. And I understood, with fresh clarity, that identity is often assigned to you long before it’s understood by you. That was a gift of living abroad — the realization that who you are is shaped as much by the places you leave as by the places you stay.

But back in the U.S., that clarity fragments. Because we are living through a very real crisis of identity — one that isn’t just cultural, but violent.

A recent investigation revealed that over 70 U.S. citizens of Latin American and other nationalities have been deported. These are people born here and have the right to be here. People with birth certificates and accents and family histories just like mine — and they were still taken.

That fact haunts me. It terrifies me. It makes the meme feel less like a joke and more like a warning. Because while we argue over who is “Latino enough,” the state has already decided who is “foreign enough” to detain.

The fear is the point.

I don’t leave the house without my ID anymore. I know that’s not normal for everyone, but it is now for me. There will be more raids. More traffic stops. More moments when someone in a uniform gets to decide whether you’re a citizen or an immigrant, a neighbor or a threat.

If a black SUV follows me too long, I’m looking in the rearview more than the road ahead.

And here’s the thing: I’m not undocumented. I’m not even particularly visible. I have all the paperwork--and wear the sort of flannels which make me blend. I pass and there is privledge in this dance. But none of that insulates you when the systems are designed not to ask, but to assume.

When we gatekeep each other — when we demand that someone look, speak, or act a certain way to “earn” their place — we’re doing the same thing. We’re turning identity into a border. We’re deciding who gets to be inside and who doesn’t. It’s easy to imagine we’re protecting something sacred. But all we’re really doing is reinforcing a logic that has always been used against us.

Latino identity has never been monolithic. It is diaspora and contradiction. It is translation and adaptation. It is ancestral and futuristic. It’s not about purity. It’s about presence.

And presence, I believe, is a form of resistance. I don’t need to prove my bloodline. I don’t need to ace a Spanish grammar quiz to belong. I am here. I’ve always been here. And if you look closely, you’ll see — so are many others.

We need to stop building moats between each other when the real threat is outside the gates.

Because if they are against some of us, they are against all of us.

Latinidad doesn’t need a purity test.

It needs solidarity.

And maybe a door.

And I’m walking through it.