Jose Alfaro
2/12/2013

Discrimination against immigrants

When I was four years old I came to this country as a US Citizen, but other people would look at me as another individual or as another illegal person. My friends from school would call me a wetback and what not, I used to think it was funny and laughed at it because I literary thought it was a person with a wet back. As I started to grow older people were not only calling me a wetback but I called other people wetbacks or immigrants without realizing what it meant. Have you ever been discriminated for being illegal? For not having papers? Or just because of the fact that you look Mexican and they just treat you without having respect for you? Racism is all over the world in each corner of all 5 continents America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and even in Australia. People all over the world discriminates everyone for their race, heck I used to be one of them. I would discriminate my own people, my type of color people, the Latinos because I wanted to fit in this world and “become someone in life” be popular but I was not realizing that I was hurting them. I would laugh and laugh without realizing what I was doing, what I was becoming, and how bad this situation was. One day my parents got a phone call from the principal of my school saying that I would to be racist again I would get expelled from school, to never go back. My parents sat me down looking at me with a angrily/ seriously face “que tienes que decir de esto?”What do you have to say about this? they asked me, with my face looking down towards the floor I started crying remembering everything I had said, and without anything to say I told them “yo no se nada” I don’t know anything I replied back to them. They sat me down and started talking to me about how discriminating my own people were bad or even discriminating anyone was bad. They explained everything to me except for one thing and that was the word wetback. The next day I went to school and what a surprise! I had an officer waiting for me at the front of the school ready to have a loooooooooooooong conversation with me, I thought to myself “stupid principle!!!.” We went into this little room and well he asked me what is a wet back to you? I replied with a scared face and told him I don’t know? He asked me do you know what racism is? I once again replied I don’t know? He suddenly answered to me with a serious face and told me “Wetback is a derogatory term used in the United States, for a non-American foreigner, commonly a Mexican citizen,