More than three decades ago, Priscilla Preciado’s father was a 21-year-old Chicano man driving with four friends to a 7-Eleven in Tustin, a city where he had recently moved and where most residents around him were white.
A police officer began following him and directed him into the store’s parking lot. One patrol car soon became two, then four.
To the officers, Preciado believes, her father’s appearance made him a target. He had slicked-back black hair, brown skin, tattoos and a commanding presence. Music by War played loudly from his lowrider. Police searched the car, but found nothing illegal. Her father and two friends who had identification were allowed to leave. Two others who did not have identification were detained.
That experience, Preciado says, has taken on new meaning as federal immigration enforcement has expanded in California and across the country. With Border Patrol agents joining Immigration and Customs Enforcement in mobile patrol operations, she sees echoes of the same racial profiling her father faced decades ago.
For Preciado, a Cal State Fullerton student studying communications with a concentration in journalism, the current climate has also narrowed the emotional distance between her life and her father’s.
Her father, the oldest of five children, grew up carrying adult responsibilities early. His father was incarcerated, and his mother worked in an appliance store to support the family. He helped care for his younger siblings and often felt like an outsider.
When Preciado asked him what parts of himself he felt others judged most, he pointed to his clothes, his skin color and his tattoos. Even now, as an adult, he told her, he still feels as though people are watching him.
Hearing those memories, Preciado said, was painful. To her, her father has always been a source of guidance and steadiness. But she also saw how years of judgment shaped the way he viewed himself.
When she was preparing to graduate from high school, she wanted him there to celebrate with her. He hesitated at the thought of stepping onto campus, worried that his appearance might somehow affect how others saw her.
He told her he did not want to get in the way of her opportunities.
To Preciado, that fear showed how deeply he had absorbed the assumptions others made about him. The world, she wrote, often reduced him to an image: a man defined by tattoos, brown skin and stereotypes. But to her, he was a devoted father, a hardworking brother and a husband — never an obstacle to her success.
She said her father wanted to separate his past from her identity so it would not limit her dreams. As his daughter, she refused to let that bond be severed.
Now, she said, his concerns have shifted from his own treatment to her safety.
He has warned her to pay close attention to her surroundings. Because her complexion is darker than that of her siblings and because she resembles him, he believes she may be more vulnerable to bias and the kinds of experiences he endured. He has urged her to be careful about where she goes and to go only when necessary.
For Preciado, immigration raids have made skin color a central concern for another generation of Latino families.
A 2021 Pew Research Center study found that 57% of Latino adults said skin color affects their daily experiences at least a great deal, while 62% said darker skin makes it harder for Latinos to get ahead in the United States.
The debate over immigration enforcement intensified after Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a concurring opinion in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, wrote that stops connected to immigration policing may be considered valid when based on certain factors. He cited the number of undocumented immigrants in the Los Angeles area, the presence of day laborers gathering at specific locations, and common jobs such as landscaping, agriculture and construction. Many legal experts have argued that the opinion effectively gives immigration agents broader room to select people for questioning based on race or appearance.
In September, the Department of Homeland Security said 2 million undocumented immigrants had left the United States, including 1.6 million described by the agency as having “voluntarily self-deported” and more than 400,000 deportations.
Preciado argues that as Latino men continue to be demonized, daughters and family members must challenge the narratives imposed on them.
She points to earlier moments of Latino and Chicano organizing in California as evidence that collective action has reshaped public life before. In 1968, about 15,000 students took part in the East Los Angeles walkouts to protest unequal treatment and discouragement of Mexican American students in schools. In the 1970s, the Brown Berets helped lead the Chicano Moratorium against the disproportionate drafting of Mexican Americans during the Vietnam War. In the 1990s, immigrant rights advocates fought against Proposition 187, California’s anti-immigrant ballot measure that was later overturned.
Those victories, Preciado wrote, came from people joining together across generations. They also reflect a lesson she said her father taught her: even in hardship, pain can become a form of light, and from that light a path forward can begin to appear.
Original source: CalMatters
