Beto Cacao is a member of the Latinx community in American and has been living in Athens for 17 years. He shares his experiences of being an immigrant in America.

Cacao speaks about how a large disadvantage for his community is the derogatory idea that someone who is a Latinx is inevitably also illegal.

He elaborates on how immigrants face both issues of segregation and discrimination that other minority groups face, but on top of that they also face the threat of deportation. He mentions how his community even see cases where U.S. citizens have been detained or deported, regardless of being a legal citizen, simply because of the color of their skin or their accent.

Cacao tells of incidents where individuals will ask him “where are you from,” pointing out his accent and the color of his skin and allowing those factors to legitimize why they think Cacao could not be from America.

“There is this pattern of seeing someone like me with an accent like I have and asking this question ‘where are you from.’ As a Latino, we constantly have been pushed from and denied from this ‘Americanism’ in every sense of the word.”

“Here in the USA, you cannot be an American unless you are white. We suffer every day.”

Cacao speaks on how, when one person is deported, the whole community suffers. This suffering is seen in schools where these children become depressed, aggressive or distracted because they are consumed by this thought of their deported relative, or they are consumed by this fear that they might come home to find their other family members having been deported. Through this, the whole community suffers, from the children in school losing their family, to the family losing their bread winner, to the employer losing their employee.

“It is an illness in our community. This is a real fear in our community.”

Cacao speaks about why he thinks many people are not upset with the inhumanity behind the deportation process. He says this is a twofold issue, one because “deportation happens in the shadows” and two because of the criminalization of the immigrant.

The criminality of these people is enforced through the language and the speech used, making the sole presence of the immigrant community criminal. Terms such as “illegal alien” are strategically repeated and reused to perpetuate the dehumanization of the immigrant community.

“We use this language where we say that there are criminals who are affecting our citizens, so we have a divide between the ‘illegals’ and the citizens. When people see the word criminal, they will never empathize with these people because they view them as criminals.”