So I am going to digress from my normal blogging about our farm and it’s animals and plants and talk about my “day job” and its implications.
I am a pediatrician and can speak English and Spanish. Because of this I have attracted a lot of Spanish speaking families into my practice to the point where it is now about 90% in Spanish. I really enjoy this. People really seem to appreciate being able to talk their native language that they are more comfortable in. I feel good helping these children with their health issues.
I do know that there is a lot of racism and classism regarding immigration now and probably always has been. I feel it’s detrimental for these American born children to be subjected to this as I sometimes see them lose self esteem and then develop risky behaviors as they grow older because of this. I want to remind people that most of us are from immigrants in this country, and many of our immigrant ancestors were poor, illiterate and didn’t speak English. Many of them took low wage jobs to support their families and were looking for a better life. Many of them found this better life. I know this is all true in my family.
I just people to stop being hateful and stereotypical. I am seeing very hard working families that care about their children and their future. I also see a wonderful cultural diversity here and would love to see more tolerance. I’ll get off my soap box now, but this is my local human rights issue.
Thank-you for this; it echoes my sentiments exactly. All my grandparents or great-grandparents were immigrants; my grandfather was a first-generation American who attended a German-speaking school through age 16.
Thanks Michelle. This is actually a post from 2008 but the link for the Bloggers Unite Human Rights expired so I updated it. My original post actually caused some controversy, but I still stand by it. We need to appreciate what our immigrant ancesters went through to leave their land and family to try to make thing better for us now. And that this continues with immigrant families today.
P.S. Have you ever heard Roger Whitaker’s song “Just Across the Rio Grande”? To me it is a heart-wrenching description of the choices facing many Mexicans and other Latinos. They would LOVE to have a legal way of entering the U.S., but don’t have as many opportunities to do that as our grandparents and great-grandparents did.
I have heard that song and like it. There are not as many legal ways to enter as for my Swedish, Irish, British and German ancesters, but there still are opportunities for betterment here.
By the way, I left that practice. I loved the work but not the workload. Now my practice consists of a very interesting variety of immigrant groups, not just Latino. They are from all over the world now.