Last week I wrote that diaspora communities have always functioned as bridges between two countries, built over centuries through congregations, remittances, and lobbying. I filed that column from Mexico City, in the middle of the American Mexican Leadership Council’s inaugural delegation. The trip is over now, and it is worth coming back to, because what happened over those the past week was not theory. It was the bridge being built in real time, in several rooms, with a name and an agenda.

More than two dozen American leaders sat down together for the first time, then moved through a U.S. Embassy briefing, a meeting with Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo’s chief of staff, Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, a working lunch on economic cooperation and North American competitiveness, and a dinner held in partnership with the US-Mexico Foundation. The week closed with site visits to the Ford Foundation and Vogue México y Latinoamérica, capped by an executive lunch on philanthropy and binational investment. Politics, economics, culture, and business over three days were not incidental programming. They were the point.

Who was in the room matters as much as where. AMLC’s own recap put it plainly: Democrats and Republicans, spanning business, government, philanthropy, law, healthcare, and civic life. A congressman and a state senator sat with healthcare executives, former ambassadors, civil rights advocates, and business leaders. That range is the same argument I made in a column on identity politics a while back: no monolithic version of this community exists, and any institution that treats it as one will fail. AMLC’s answer was to build a table big enough to represent the diverse voices of this diaspora.

That table framing is deliberate. AMLC opened its own announcement of the trip by noting that a community of nearly 40 million people, contributing close to 2 trillion dollars a year to the American economy, has historically never had a seat at the table where decisions about the U.S.-Mexico relationship get made, and said plainly that this is about to change. I have written for years about wanting exactly that, a seat at the table and a voice in shaping the future. A single delegation does not build a pipeline by itself, but it is the kind of opening move a pipeline needs.

The timing was not an accident either. On July 1, the United States declined to renew the USMCA for another 16 years, triggering annual reviews that now run until the agreement’s scheduled expiration in 2036, with a fourth and reportedly decisive round of U.S.-Mexico bilateral talks scheduled for September in Washington. I wrote earlier this summer that the three nations sharing a stage at the World Cup draw were not, in fact, sharing a table in the trade room. That test is now underway in the actual trade rooms instead of the stadiums, and AMLC’s working lunch on economic cooperation and competitiveness landed squarely inside it.

The economics are the least abstract part of this. Mexico is the United States’ largest trading partner, and AMLC’s own figures put that relationship at roughly 935 billion dollars a year, supporting millions of American jobs on both sides of the border. I wrote last week that remittances alone move tens of billions of dollars a year between the two countries, money that funds tuition and small businesses in towns the sender may never see again, and argued these ties are an economic lifeline to be protected rather than a lever to be taxed. AMLC’s delegation was an attempt to give that instinct an actual seat in the room where trade terms get negotiated.

What makes this different from past diaspora institutions is who counts as a constituent. Roughly 11.7 million Mexican nationals live in the United States, by Mexico’s own count, and by some State Department estimates as many as 1.6 million Americans live in Mexico, more of them than in any other country on earth. AMLC’s roster included people living on both sides of that relationship, and its agenda, a U.S. Embassy briefing paired with a meeting in the Mexican president’s own office, treated both governments as equally necessary partners rather than one host and one guest. A real, underused frontier hides in those numbers too. Mexican election law lets citizens abroad vote for president and senate, and one academic estimate puts the pool of Mexicans abroad holding a valid voter credential at 4.2 million. A bloc that size has the potential to swing a close Mexican election on its own.

I have spent most of my career on one side of this particular bridge, first as a Senate aide working Latino outreach for Harry Reid, working on a variety of political campaigns, running Latino political strategy at NDN, where I also led the Latin America Policy Initiative, and now leading the Latin America practice at FTP, advising companies and investors on the politics that move between Washington and Mexico City. My own family runs through both countries too, and I have written about that directly. I have sat across the table from foreign ambassadors, presidents, elected officials, and their staffs before, so a room like the one at the Oficina de la Presidenta is familiar territory. What was new was doing it as part of a delegation built specifically to give a diaspora a standing seat, rather than a one-time meeting.

AMLC closed its own recap of the trip with a promise rather than a conclusion: a formal announcement of next steps is coming. That is the right instinct. A bridge that gets used once is a bridge that gets forgotten. The test now is the same one I posed about the World Cup and about diaspora communities generally: whether this becomes a platform that outlasts the delegation that built it, or a photograph of one good week in Mexico City. This trip made the case that the table is worth building. What comes next will decide whether anyone keeps a permanent chair at it.

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I am filing this column from Mexico City, where I will spend this week as one of thirty delegates on the American Mexican Leadership Council’s inaugural leadership delegation, a bipartisan group of Mexican American leaders across business, philanthropy, policy, academia, and culture, in meetings with U.S. Embassy officials, Mexico’s Foreign Ministry, and business leaders from both countries. AMLC helped launch the first bipartisan U.S.-Mexico Congressional Caucus earlier this year, and this delegation builds directly on that work. It is a useful vantage point for writing about diaspora, because diaspora politics is happening in real time: a community organizing its own scale into a formal seat at the table.

That impulse is not new. In September of 1654, twenty-three Sephardic Jews arrived penniless in New Amsterdam after fleeing the Portuguese reconquest of Dutch Brazil. Within months they had organized Congregation Shearith Israel, the first formal Jewish community in North America. Three years later, twenty-eight Scottish immigrants in Boston signed the founding papers of the Scots’ Charitable Society, pledging relief “for our selves being Scottishmen or for any of the Scottish nation whome we may see cause to help.” Both institutions predate the country itself by more than a century. Diaspora, it turns out, is older than America.

That is worth sitting with, because the word gets treated today as shorthand for an immigration debate, a question of who is let in and who is sent back. It is really a much older and more durable story about how communities scattered from a homeland stay tied to it, financially, politically, and culturally, without ever fully belonging to just one place. The United States alone is home to dozens of formally organized diaspora communities. I’ll be using four American diaspora communities to illustrate how differently that bridge gets built, and how consistently it gets used.

Start with the oldest presence and the newest reunion. African Americans trace their arrival in English North America to 1619, but it took until 1787 for a formal community institution to exist, when Richard Allen and Absalom Jones founded the Free African Society in Philadelphia, a mutual aid society for the city’s newly freed Black residents. Two centuries later, Ghana turned the anniversary of that original, forced migration into a deliberate act of bridge building. Its 2019 Year of Return, marking four hundred years since the first enslaved Africans reached Virginia, invited the African diaspora to visit, invest, and in some cases stay, and generated an estimated 1.9 billion dollars in tourism revenue. Its follow-up, Beyond the Return, has since granted Ghanaian citizenship to hundreds of African Americans, 524 of them in a single ceremony in late 2024. Organizer Boris Kodjoe put the goal plainly in describing the campaign: it is “about building a bridge between the diaspora and the continent.” For a diaspora that never chose its own dispersal, the bridge had to be built from scratch, four centuries later, largely by the country on the other end.

Mexican Americans show the bridge in more than one register at once, financial and now institutional. On the financial side, Mexico received 64.7 billion dollars in remittances in 2024, its single largest source of foreign income, ahead of oil, tourism, or foreign direct investment individually. In states like Guerrero and Chiapas, remittances now account for nearly 14 percent of state GDP, money that pays rent and school fees in towns the sender may never see again. That bridge is now under direct legislative pressure. A new 1 percent federal excise tax on cash-based remittance transfers took effect January 1st, with full enforcement beginning by year’s end, and research suggests each percentage point of tax knocks remittance flows down by about 1.6 percent. It is the financial mirror of the cross border relationship I described in the Politics of Water, where Nevada paid to modernize irrigation on Mexican farms just to keep more water in Lake Mead, and the institutional side of this particular bridge is what this week in Mexico City actually is. AMLC puts the numbers at nearly 40 million people of Mexican heritage living in the United States, contributing close to 2 trillion dollars a year to the U.S. economy, with Mexico as the United States’ largest trading partner in a relationship worth roughly 935 billion dollars in annual trade. A diaspora that size does not automatically get a formal channel to the governments on either side of the border. This year it built one.

Irish Americans built the same bridge in the opposite direction, funding a homeland’s break from an empire rather than propping up its economy. In 1919, the newly declared Irish revolutionary government sent Éamon de Valera on an eighteen month tour of the United States to sell bond certificates to the Irish American diaspora, raising just over 5.1 million dollars from more than 276,000 subscribers, a literal bet on independence that promised repayment once Ireland broke free of British rule. That same diaspora energy built Tammany Hall into the machine that elected New York’s first Irish Catholic mayor in 1880 and Boston’s in 1884, and it never really stopped operating in Washington. Four Irish American members of Congress, known as the Four Horsemen, spent the 1970s and 80s pulling American policy toward a negotiated peace in Northern Ireland, work that culminated in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and, by credible academic accounts, is still active today, more than a quarter century later, on issues like Britain’s Legacy Act.

Indian Americans are running the same play India once ran on itself. Three separate times, in 1991, 1998, and 2000, the Indian government issued bonds sold specifically to non resident Indians at a deliberate below market rate, a “patriotic discount,” raising more than 11 billion dollars during balance of payments crises and sanctions. It is the same mechanism as the Irish bond, a diaspora literally financing its homeland’s survival, just run by a government still in power rather than one in exile. Today India remains the world’s largest remittance recipient, Indian Americans are the highest earning ethnic group in the country, and the community is fielding a record number of candidates in this year’s midterms, from school boards to Congress.

Scholars have a name for all of this: diaspora diplomacy, communities that function as an unofficial channel between two governments, loyal enough to both to be useful to each. What should strike you is how little it tracks with party or era. Irish American lobbying reshaped foreign policy under Reagan and Clinton alike. Ghana’s outreach to Black America is bipartisan by design. AMLC’s own congressional caucus was built as bipartisan on purpose. Diaspora politics does not sort neatly into our usual categories, because the loyalty it describes runs sideways to them, toward a place instead of a party.

Which brings the argument back to Shearith Israel and the Scots’ Charitable Society, both still standing, still doing roughly what they were founded to do, and to the room in Mexico City where I am finishing this column. A hyphen in Irish American or Indian American or Mexican American reads, to some people, like a subtraction, an admission of divided loyalty. The history, and this week, say the opposite. It is a bridge, and it has been carrying two-way traffic, money, votes, citizenship papers, revolutionary bonds, and now delegations like this one, since before there was a United States to be American in.

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Today is Surveillance Day. If you have never heard of it, you are forgiven. It began online as Wave At The Surveillance Cameras Day, an observance with murky origins, possibly born of the Occupy era around 2011, before its founder shortened the name in 2018. The instructions were simple. Find a camera, look up, and wave. The joke landed because the imbalance was obvious. The camera sees you, and you cannot see who is behind it. For years the day was a bit of harmless fun. This year it reads more like a dare.

Longtime readers will remember that when I wrote about the politics of privacy, the question was what governments and companies could collect about us. The question has since moved. The fight is no longer over whether America will be watched, because that argument is functionally over. The fight now is whether watching runs one way or both. Who gets to watch whom, and what we call the footage when it surfaces, is where the politics of surveillance actually lives.

Start with how settled the first question is. The first CCTV camera was built in Germany in 1942 so engineers could watch V-2 rocket launches, a reminder that this technology was born military. Olean, New York became the first American city to put cameras on a business street in 1968, Times Square followed in 1973, and September 11 turned expansion into doctrine. Today surveillance is not a program but an economy. The global video surveillance market reached about $83 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit roughly $205 billion by 2033. The Department of Homeland Security has committed more than $2.9 billion to surveillance and data tools since 2021. Contracts between ICE and CBP and their surveillance vendors, under $50 million as recently as 2013, hit a record $513 million this year. And the cameras are only the visible layer. The State Department now requires student visa applicants to make their social media public for vetting, immigration services will collect the social media handles of more than 3 million applicants a year, microphones listen for gunfire in some 150 cities, and Ring doorbells let police request footage from your neighbors. Flock Safety, the license plate reader firm valued at $7.5 billion whose network has grown past 100,000 cameras photographing our comings and goings, is simply the example of the moment.

The case for all this hardware is real, and honesty requires saying so. Plate readers help find stolen cars, locate missing people, and close cases that would otherwise go cold, a record even skeptical coverage acknowledges. A federal judge in Norfolk ruled in January that Flock’s cameras do not violate the Fourth Amendment, though he warned that could change as the network grows. But the ledger’s other side has been filling fast. The Washington Post found at least 50 officers accused, charged, or convicted of using plate readers to stalk exes and partners. A Texas deputy ran a nationwide search of 83,000 cameras for a woman who had self-administered an abortion, logging the reason as “had an abortion, search for female”, and though the sheriff called it a welfare check, court records show deputies opened a death investigation and consulted prosecutors about charges. The machines also simply get it wrong. In Chicago, roughly nine in ten gunshot detection alerts turn up no evidence of a gun crime, one such alert set in motion the police response that ended with 13-year-old Adam Toledo shot dead, and faulty ShotSpotter evidence kept Michael Williams jailed for nearly a year for a killing he did not commit. And audits kept finding local camera data queried thousands of times for immigration enforcement, in Santa Cruz roughly 4,000 times in five months, often in violation of the cities’ own policies. For Latino communities, this is the detail that collapses the abstraction. The watching is not evenly distributed, and it never has been.

What makes this moment genuinely political is that the backlash refuses to sort by party. The college towns canceling Flock contracts sit alongside Arkansas, Idaho, and Montana, conservative states that passed their own data protection laws. Local officials describe council chambers filling with work boots and Subarus alike. The cancellations, more than 20 in July alone, the most in any month since activists began tracking in 2021, are still a fraction of Flock’s business, but the direction is the story: the company grew for years without organized opposition, and now cities are going out of their way to leave. Lawmakers in 35 states filed nearly 100 plate reader bills this year, Washington, Oregon, and Virginia enacted restrictions, and California’s SB 1013 is moving through the Assembly. Congress, meanwhile, passed two short stopgaps on its marquee spying authority before letting Section 702 of FISA lapse in June for the first time since 2008, even as the collection quietly continues under court certifications that run into 2027. And 702 belongs in this column, because the law aimed at foreigners was used by the FBI to search Americans’ communications, including protesters and 19,000 donors to a single congressional campaign. The states are legislating while Washington cannot even keep its own program on the books, though the watching, naturally, goes on. Flock itself blinked on Thursday, announcing new guardrails and cutting default data retention from 30 days to seven while its chief executive insisted the company is not Big Brother. Companies that are winning the argument do not have to say so, and whether an industry this lucrative can police itself is a question American history has answered before.

Here is the nuance the firestorm keeps missing. The most consequential surveillance story of the past year may not be the government watching the public at all. It is the public watching back. Bystander cellphone video contradicted the official account of the Gabriel Hurtado-Cariaco arrest. In Minnesota, none of the half-dozen recordings of the Alex Pretti shooting showed him brandishing a weapon, only his phone. A Senate report found agents have repeatedly turned violent when people tried to film them. State attorneys general now treat citizen footage as core evidence, and Minnesota and California built portals to collect it. None of this accountability arrived on its own. The Illinois audit that caught illegal federal access to plate data was ordered only after journalists exposed the Texas abortion search, which raises the question that should keep us up at night: how many abuses never surface because no one was filming, complaining, or filing records requests? Scholars have a name for this, sousveillance, watching from below. Volunteers at DeFlock have mapped more than 100,000 of Flock’s own cameras, turning the company’s playbook against it.

And the reaction to being watched has been telling. Kristi Noem, while homeland security secretary, declared that filming agents is violence, though seven federal appeals circuits protect the right to record. Her department went further, demanding that social media companies unmask the accounts that track or criticize ICE. Apple and Google pulled ICE-tracking apps at the Justice Department’s demand, a decision with a legitimate grievance behind it, since officials say a gunman used one before the deadly Dallas ICE facility shooting. Officer safety is not a talking point, and any honest version of this conversation has to hold it. But Flock’s CEO also called the volunteers mapping his cameras a terroristic organization, an insult he later walked back, and Congress is now weighing a Right to Record Act because federal officers keep retaliating against people with phones. Notice the pattern. When the state watches citizens, it is called public safety. When citizens watch the state, it is called a threat.

That double standard, not the cameras themselves, is what should worry us, because a society that accepts one-way surveillance has accepted something about who holds power and who submits to it. The tools are here to stay. The politics will decide whether they serve accountability or only authority. So today, when you pass one of those sleek poles on your drive, go ahead and wave. Just remember that the wave was always a joke about powerlessness, and the phone in your other hand turned out to be the punchline. The cameras are watching us. It's been important for Americans to watch back.

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When I booked my trip to Puerto Rico, I had no idea that the Puerto Rico government would announce it was shutting off the water on the day that I would arrive. I want to be careful about what I am and am not in a position to say here. I am a visitor with a hotel room, a backup cistern, and a return flight, not a resident deciding whether to fill buckets before the tap goes dry. What I can offer is the same thing I offered writing about the Colorado River one week ago, an objective look at how policy, delay, and geography combine to produce a shortage, because an island ringed by the Atlantic and the Caribbean running out of water is the starkest version of that argument I have seen yet.

The facts of this week are straightforward. Beginning this past Friday, the government began rotating 48-hour service interruptions across San Juan and six surrounding municipalities, drawing down what remains in the Carraízo reservoir and affecting, by some estimates, as many as 500,000 people. San Juan just recorded its driest July in 120 years of record-keeping, and forecasters expect little rain before September. The chair of the water authority’s governing board resigned this week, saying the decision to ration was never brought to his board at all. But the drought is only the trigger. Back in June, a rupture in the island’s Superaqueduct pipeline left parts of San Juan without reliable water for more than two months, before the drought had meaningfully worsened. In the Machuchal neighborhood, residents kept their own log and counted 118 days without running water through the start of August, which one community organizer there blames in part on utility staff unfamiliar with how to manually operate valves after a recent change in administration. Whatever is happening this month was already happening before the summer, in a year the federal drought monitor started out calling dry-free.

That timing points to the real story, which is the same one Corpus Christi told a few weeks ago, just with different props. Puerto Rico’s water authority, the AAA, has jurisdiction over only 8 of the island’s 36 reservoirs. Two of the ones it does control, Dos Bocas and Guayabal, have lost 70 percent and 50 percent of their capacity to sediment that was simply never dredged. More than half of the treated water the island produces leaks out before reaching a customer, an estimated $98 million a year in losses, through pipes that in many neighborhoods date to the 1940s. None of that is new information to anyone who follows the island. It is a problem that has been visible, mapped, and unfixed for years, and a drought simply called the bill due.

The politics sit on top of the pipes. Puerto Rico has operated under a federally imposed fiscal oversight board since 2016, created by Congress under PROMESA to manage a debt crisis, and for years, it constrained how much capital the water authority could spend on exactly the kind of maintenance now missing. After Hurricane Maria, Washington allocated more than $5 billion for water infrastructure alone, but disbursements have lagged for years behind the need. Commentators across the island, not just on one side of the aisle, have pointed to this as a consequence of Puerto Rico’s unresolved status, a territory whose residents cannot vote for the president or full members of Congress who shape the funding and oversight rules governing its own utility. I am not going to adjudicate that debate in this column, because it is genuinely contested among Puerto Ricans themselves, spanning statehood supporters, defenders of the current commonwealth arrangement, and independence advocates. But it is a fair and recurring point in the island's own coverage of this crisis, and it deserves to be named rather than skipped, alongside plainer local failures, aging equipment, undredged reservoirs, and crews stretched thin, that have nothing to do with Washington at all.

Here is the part that stayed with me, walking through Condado this week. The tourism zones I am staying in are, by most accounts, barely touched, a fact about money and visibility, not about anyone’s politics. Puerto Rico’s Tourism Company has been running water trucks around the clock, distributing more than 650,000 gallons over 116 trips to hotels in Condado, Isla Verde, and Old San Juan alone, and large properties have been pulling in up to 40 tanker trucks a day to keep pools full and taps running. Meanwhile, in neighborhoods a few minutes away, residents are hauling buckets up stairwells and logging which days the pipes ran dry. I’m not writing this to express concern about my own inconvenience, because I have not had any. The island’s most visible economic engine is being insulated from a crisis that its residents cannot escape.

Puerto Rico is not alone in this. The Caribbean is enduring one of its driest years in over a decade under a strong El Niño, and as of this month’s regional drought monitor, extreme drought grips the U.S. Virgin Islands alongside Puerto Rico, while forecasters have issued warnings or watches for Grenada, St. Lucia, Trinidad, and Barbados this year as well. In St. Lucia, the water utility reported network production cut nearly in half, and the tourism industry at one point considered barging water in from neighboring Dominica. But two nearby responses show dry weather does not have to mean prolonged rationing. Facing the same drought this summer, utility crews in the U.S. Virgin Islands contracted a private desalination provider that says it had a partial unit running in 29 days and a full plant online in 48, refilling storage tanks that had gone dry, while Puerto Rico’s own federally funded capital projects remain years from completion. In the Bahamas, a similar performance-based contract with a private operator helped the national water utility cut the water lost to leaks and theft from 57.7 percent to 32.2 percent in about two and a half years, starting from almost exactly the leak rate Puerto Rico reports today. Neither government waited to fix the problem. Each identified a timely and affordable solution and moved forward.

The same principle holds further from the tropics. Compare Puerto Rico’s fragmented governance to what I previously wrote about Las Vegas. Nevada holds the smallest Colorado River allocation of any basin state and still cut per capita water use 58 percent by treating conservation as infrastructure and consolidating authority under a single water agency accountable for the whole system. Puerto Rico is closer to the opposite model, a utility with authority over a fraction of its own reservoirs, a leak rate that would be a scandal anywhere on the mainland, and a maintenance backlog that outlasted an entire fiscal oversight regime built to fix exactly this kind of dysfunction. The fixes are not mysterious, and the Bahamas and the Virgin Islands just demonstrated two of them. Consolidate reservoir jurisdiction so one entity is accountable for the whole watershed. Fund leak repair before new supply, since recovering even a third of that lost water would rival a new reservoir at a fraction of the cost. Finish the capital projects that federal money has already paid for, rather than letting them sit in planning. None of that requires resolving the status question first.

Which is the note I want to end on, because it is the one thing I am confident saying as an outsider. Whatever a Puerto Rican believes about statehood, the current commonwealth status, or independence, that belief does not change how much water their household needs to cook, bathe, and stay healthy. Water is one of the few issues that does not sort neatly by political camp, and that ought to make it one of the easiest problems to build consensus around. The island I am visiting this week is surrounded by more water than most of the country I flew in from will ever see, and its taps are still running dry on a schedule. That contradiction is not a mystery to be solved by more rain. It is a policy, built over decades, and like every policy in this series, it can be changed.

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On Friday, the federal government did something it had spent years hoping the states would spare it from. The Bureau of Reclamation released its own blueprint for dividing the Colorado River, the water source for more than 40 million people across seven states, several tribal nations, and Mexico. After years of deadlocked negotiations, threatened lawsuits, and a record-dry winter that left Lake Mead and Lake Powell at their lowest levels since they began filling, Washington stepped in with a plan that would force Arizona, California, and Nevada to cut their use by up to 3 million acre-feet a year through 2036. That is roughly what Arizona and Nevada receive combined, enough water for more than 25 million people. Arizona called it devastating. Nevada called it unrealistic. California called it a milestone, but not the finish line. The Upper Basin states, whose cuts would remain voluntary, pronounced themselves encouraged, which tells you who won. The final decision is expected within days, and it will govern the river for the next decade.

I have been writing about defaults, the arrangements nobody negotiated, but everybody lives under, and the Colorado River is the oldest and largest default in American life. The compact that divides it was written in 1922, and it promised the states more water than the river reliably carries. Every fight since has been a fight over shares of water that do not exist. Now the reservoirs are approaching the point where they can no longer generate hydropower, and the bill for a hundred years of promising too much is coming due, not in theory but on water bills. The city of Gilbert, outside Phoenix, has raised residential rates by 50 percent since last April. Rhett Larson, a water law professor at Arizona State, put it plainly. “We are not running out of water,” he said. “We’re running out of cheap water.”

It is worth pausing on what is actually riding on this. Water is the quiet input to nearly everything we take for granted. The Colorado alone irrigates land that produces 15 percent of America’s food output and generates power for 6 million people. Farmers in Yuma, Arizona, and Southern California grow most of North America’s winter leafy greens with the river’s water, so the river’s politics reach your grocery cart in February. And the pressure keeps building from directions the 1922 negotiators never imagined. Amazon disclosed in June that its data centers used 2.5 billion gallons of water last year, and about two-thirds of the 809 data centers proposed in this country are slated for drought-prone places like Arizona and Texas. Even our adversaries have noticed what water is worth. This past week, hackers that investigators suspect are tied to Iran attacked municipal water systems in at least seven states. In Minnesota, about 36 systems were hit, and small towns had to run their plants by hand. Michigan reported nine systems targeted. A foreign power looking for America’s softest, most vital target did not pick the banks. It picked the water.

Here is the part I want to dwell on, because it is the reason to write this column now rather than after the crisis arrives. The Southwest still has time. The federal plan, whatever its flaws, is designed to force decisions while options remain, and we know exactly what happens when communities spend that time badly, because some already have. During California’s 2011 to 2017 drought, nearly 12,000 people ran out of water at home, concentrated in rural communities of the San Joaquin Valley. The state has recorded more than 1,400 dry household wells in a single year, and at one point, about 1,800 households in the valley were receiving their water by truck. Researchers estimate one in thirty wells across the West went dry in just a three-year stretch of the last decade. Last fall, the small town of Mathis, Texas, which draws everything from Lake Corpus Christi, was told its intake would be pulling mud within months and raced to drill emergency wells. Running out of water is not a hypothetical. It is a lived experience for thousands of American families, and in nearly every case, the disaster was not sudden. It was scheduled, visible years in advance, and met with delay.

Which brings me to Corpus Christi, the city downstream of Mathis and the clearest case study I know of how poorly planned and poorly implemented policy squanders time. Five years of drought drained the city’s two main reservoirs to historic lows, a combined 8 percent of capacity, and residents have lived under Stage 3 restrictions that ban lawn watering outright since late 2024. The city saw all of this coming and bet on seawater desalination, a real solution used around the world. Then the project’s price grew from a few hundred million dollars to $1.2 billion over a decade of studies and false starts. The council canceled the contract in a 1 a.m. vote at the end of a thirteen-hour meeting, and this June declined to apply for up to $120 million in federal grants for the same plant on a 5 to 4 vote. To its credit, the city is now working every option at once, negotiating to buy 9 million gallons a day from a private desalination plant built by a plastics manufacturer, leasing groundwater, and expanding pipelines. Last month, the city was rescued by something no council can vote on. Floodwater from the storms that devastated the Hill Country flowed south into its reservoirs, lifting them to 26 percent and pushing the projected water emergency from this fall to September 2028. Officials may ease restrictions within days. That is genuinely good news, and it should fool no one. A decade of delay left the eighth-largest city in Texas dependent on the path of a flood. Rain is weather. It is not a policy.

If Corpus Christi is the cautionary tale, Las Vegas is the proof that the other path exists, and this is the part of the story I know firsthand. Almost fifteen years ago, I cofounded Nuestro Rio, a coalition of Latinos across the basin built on a simple premise: that the millions of families who depend on the Colorado deserve a voice in how it is managed. We spent those years making the case for urban conservation, agricultural efficiency, and water banking. Las Vegas is what it looks like when that agenda becomes policy. No American city has less margin for error. Nevada’s Colorado River allocation is 300,000 acre-feet a year, the smallest share of any state in the basin, and the river supplies about 90 percent of the metro area’s water. Yet the Southern Nevada Water Authority spent two decades treating conservation as infrastructure. It paid residents and businesses to tear out 250 million square feet of grass, saving 203 billion gallons since 1999. It banned front lawns in new subdivisions in 2004, put golf courses on water budgets, limited pool sizes, and pushed the Legislature to pass a first-in-the-nation law that ends the watering of decorative grass on commercial and public properties beginning next January. Nearly all the water used indoors in Southern Nevada is treated and returned to Lake Mead for credit, and the authority spent more than $800 million on a third intake near the bottom of the lake so the city can keep drawing water at levels that would idle Hoover Dam. The results are the opposite of Corpus Christi’s arithmetic. Per capita water use in Southern Nevada has fallen 58 percent since 2002, while the region added roughly 876,000 residents. None of this has been friction-free. ProPublica found the authority overestimated how much decorative grass it can realistically remove, and residents have sued in federal court claiming its enforcement is heavy-handed. But the direction is not in dispute, and neither is the outcome.

The deeper lesson from Las Vegas is diplomatic, not domestic. Its water authority understood something the compact states spent a century resisting. Survival depends on water the city does not own, so it started buying security wherever a dollar stretched furthest. Under a 2012 binational accord with Mexico, an arrangement renewed and expanded in 2017, Nevada invested in lining Mexican irrigation canals and modernizing how Mexican farms water their crops. In exchange, Mexico gained the right to store up to 1.5 million acre-feet in Lake Mead, enough to raise the reservoir by as much as 15 feet, and Nevada received a 23,700 acre-foot share of the savings. Every drop of water Mexico banks props up the lake that Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles all drink from. The authority applied the same logic north of the border. It put up $28.6 million toward Brock Reservoir in California to capture river water that would otherwise be lost, earning 400,000 acre-feet in storage credits, and it joined California and Arizona in paying farmers in the Palo Verde Valley to leave fields unplanted, banking up to 180,000 acre-feet in Lake Mead. This spring, the Lower Basin plan that Nevada helped negotiate included another 250,000 acre-feet a year from Mexico on top of the state’s own cuts. Notice the pattern. A city of 2.3 million people is financing irrigation upgrades on foreign farms and fallowing programs in another state, because it did the math and found that the cheapest water anywhere is the water someone else no longer wastes.

That is the choice in front of the Colorado basin states, and in front of every growing region in the country. The technology exists. The money exists. Even the politics can work when someone asks voters directly. Last November, Texans approved Proposition 4, dedicating a billion dollars a year for twenty years to water supply, infrastructure, and flood projects, the largest water investment in state history, and it passed overwhelmingly without raising a tax in a state not famous for loving public spending. Voters are ahead of their leaders on this. I learned that lesson with Nuestro Rio. When we polled Latinos across the basin in 2012, more than 90 percent said protecting our rivers and lakes mattered to them, a full generation before their leaders got serious. Voters understand that water reaches the tap through a thousand political choices about who pays, who conserves, and who gets cut first, choices made so long ago we mistake them for nature. In my last column, I wrote that policies can be changed. So is the River Compact of 1922. The Southwest has been handed something the families with dry wells in the San Joaquin Valley never got, a deadline far enough away to act on. Corpus Christi was bailed out by rain it did not plan for. The Colorado basin should not count on the same. It does not need to, because the city everyone assumed would die of thirst first has already written the manual.

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Nobody seems to have researched this, so I ran the numbers myself. Start with the basics. There are about 159 million people on nonfarm payrolls in this country, and the average private sector worker earns $1,291 a week. Among private employers, 43 percent pay biweekly and 27 percent pay weekly, so for this exercise, I assumed every worker falls into one of those two schedules. Then I asked a question the law never asks. What if every dollar you earned went to work for you the day you earned it, sitting in an ordinary interest-bearing account until payday, when you would spend it exactly as you do now?

Basic economics teaches us that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. Banks build their entire business on that truth. They calculate interest on your balance every day, and the better savings accounts currently pay around 4 percent, compounded daily. On day one of a pay period, your wages sit for 13 days before a biweekly payday. Day two, twelve days. The last day earns nothing. Add it up, let the interest compound, and the average American worker paid biweekly would earn about $48 a year. Paid weekly, about $22. On the same biweekly schedule, a full-time worker at the federal minimum wage would collect roughly $11, and someone earning $250,000 would collect about $178.

I can already hear the objection, because I made it myself. Nobody is marching on Washington for $48. That is true, and it is precisely the point. The amounts are calibrated to be invisible. No individual worker will ever fight over their share, no reporter will profile the family that lost $11, and no politician will campaign on it. The system takes a small amount from everyone, every day, forever, and no one has standing to complain.

But watch what happens when you add it up. Total wages and salaries in this country run at about $13.4 trillion a year. Under the actual mix of weekly and biweekly schedules, the earned but unpaid wages sitting in employer accounts at any given moment come to roughly $189 billion. Corporate finance has a name for money like this. It is called the float, and it never really drains, because as each payday empties it, new work refills it. American workers are extending their employers a permanent, revolving, interest-free loan of $189 billion, and nobody ever signed a loan agreement.

At 4 percent, the interest workers forgo on that loan is about $7.5 billion every year. Numbers that size lose meaning without comparison, so here are a few. It is more than the entire general fund of the State of Nevada, which runs about $6.1 billion a year. It is more than the $5.8 billion in overdraft and insufficient funds fees that the nation’s large banks collected from customers in a year. It is three times what payday lenders extract in fees from desperate borrowers. It would nearly fund the entire WIC program, which feeds almost seven million mothers and young children each month.

Suppose we flipped the default and required wages to be funded as they are earned. Companies would replace the float with ordinary working capital, and that credit is not free. Blue chip corporations borrow through commercial paper at about 3.7 percent. Smaller firms borrow at the prime rate of 6.75 percent or above. Across the economy, replacing the float would cost employers somewhere between $7 billion and $16 billion a year, realistically $11 to $13 billion. That is the size of the subsidy workers currently provide, and it is bigger than the $7.5 billion workers would earn on the same money, because businesses always borrow at higher rates than households save. The float is not just a transfer. It is a transfer with a markup.

And employers do not let that cash sit idle. Corporate treasurers park operating cash in money market funds yielding close to 4 percent, which means companies are already earning billions of dollars every year on wages their workers have earned but have not yet received. Now hold that fact next to another one. Two in three Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. The people with the least margin for error, the ones a single delayed dollar can push into overdraft fees, are the same people floating their employers a $189 billion loan at no charge, while those employers turn the interest-free loan into interest income. Workers carry the burden. Employers collect the benefit. Once again, employees get the short end of the stick, subsidizing the companies they work for through a deal they never agreed to and cannot opt out of.

The number on your paystub was negotiated. Somebody haggled over it, benchmarked it, and approved it. The timing of your paystub was not negotiated by anyone. It was inherited, defended as an administrative convenience, and quietly monetized. Last week, I wrote that my parents carried the stress of the waiting period, so their employers did not have to. Now I can tell you what carrying it was worth, roughly $11 billion a year, collected in increments too small to fight over, from the people least able to spare them. That is not an accounting quirk. That is a policy, and policies can be changed.

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That decision was not about laziness. It was about understanding how the rules of wages work in this country and using the tiny bit of flexibility I had. Payday was still days away. The landlord, the utility companies, the grocery store, and the gas station all wanted their money on time. The only lever I had was my own time and my own risk. So I did what millions of workers do when the system is not built for them. I rearranged my life around the payroll calendar and hoped nothing else went wrong.

We talk a lot about wages in American politics. We fight over the minimum wage, union rights, and “fair” pay, but we almost never talk about when workers get paid and why that timing is treated as a neutral administrative detail instead of a political choice. Legally, once you perform work under a valid agreement, the wages for that work become a debt your employer owes you, while state payday laws set the schedule for when those wages have to be delivered. Some states also add penalties and interest when employers miss those deadlines, which is the law’s own way of recognizing that delayed pay has real value.

Where the law is far more permissive is timing. Federal law leaves much of pay frequency to the states, which often allow monthly, semi-monthly, biweekly, or weekly schedules, as the Labor Department’s state payday table makes clear. Most employers stay within those legal boundaries. The problem is that those boundaries were drawn around employers’ preferences, not workers’ stability. The money is yours in principle, but the timeline belongs to someone else.

Employers choose pay schedules that fit their needs and then workers are forced to organize their lives around those choices. Human resources departments and corporate executives explain those decisions in the language of cost, compliance, and convenience, pointing out that every payroll run requires staff time, software, and safeguards against mistakes and that fewer runs mean lower administrative costs. That is the official story. It is not complete.

Every day between the moment a worker earns a dollar and the day that dollar hits their account, the employer is holding money that legally belongs to someone else. The wages sit on the company’s books as a liability and in the company’s accounts as cash. That cash can be used to manage working capital, smooth bills, or reduce borrowing costs. That waiting period is not just an accounting choice. It is a quiet transfer of risk from the company’s balance sheet to the worker’s kitchen table. In practice, that means workers are extending an interest-free loan to their employers, advancing labor now while the company holds the cash and manages its own balance sheet until payday.

I did not learn any of this from a chart. I learned it at my family’s kitchen table. I grew up in a household that lived inside that waiting period. There were weeks when we skipped meals, skipped medical appointments, put off treatment, not because my family did not value health, but because the next paycheck had not arrived yet. The rules allowed employers to accumulate a week or two of my family’a labor before paying them. Those rules were written in the language of efficiency. In the real world they meant my parents carried the stress and the consequences so that the employer did not have to.

The official numbers match what many of us have lived. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has documented the long divergence between productivity and compensation. Brookings’ Hamilton Project notes that after adjusting for inflation, wages were only about 10 percent higher in 2017 than they were in 1973. The St. Louis Fed tracks the decline in labor’s share of income over time. Low wage workers and communities of color, with the least savings or cheap credit, feel these rules first and hardest.

That decline in labor’s share is not a footnote. It is a warning sign. An economy where workers produce more but take home a shrinking share of what they create is not just unfair. It is fragile. Economists have long argued that when wages lag productivity, aggregate demand suffers because working and middle class households have less money to spend, save, and invest. A country built on consumer spending cannot indefinitely starve consumers and call that efficiency.

Then came the recent surge in prices. Rent, groceries, energy, and basic services jumped faster than many paychecks, and even as nominal wages rose, a lot of households never caught up with the cost of living. During the early years of this inflation spike, Groundwork Collaborative found that corporate profits drove 53 percent of inflation during the second and third quarters of 2023 and more than one-third of price growth since the start of the pandemic. Politicians, pundits, and even some central bankers warned about wage pressures, but for workers living paycheck to paycheck that story often felt backward.

Meanwhile, executive pay has detached from any reasonable sense of proportion. AFL-CIO Paywatch reports that CEOs at S&P 500 companies earned an average of $18.9 million in 2024 and took home about 285 times what their typical workers earned. Corporate profits remain near their highest shares of GDP in the postwar era, while wages and salaries claim a smaller share of the economy than they once did. These are the conditions in which companies insist that moving from biweekly to weekly payroll is just too expensive to contemplate.

I have sat in rooms where those claims are taken at face value, where protecting margins and satisfying investors is treated as the only responsible choice, and it is important to be honest about what those decisions really say. When a company posting strong profits and paying its leadership eight figure packages insists it cannot afford to run payroll more often, it is not saying the money does not exist. It is saying that, given a choice, it would rather protect the surplus at the top than give workers faster, more reliable access to the wages they have already earned.

I still have family members who live the old paycheck reality. I now sit in rooms where people like my younger self are rarely mentioned except as line items. Holding both realities at once is uncomfortable. It should be. Because until we name the politics of wages honestly, we will keep telling workers the problem is their budgeting, their choices, their expectations. The problem is a wage system that makes that feel like the smartest move and then blames workers when the math still does not work.

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American marriage has changed more than almost any other institution in our private lives, but our politics still treats it like the same old cornerstone of adulthood.

The gap between how Americans actually build their families and how our laws and incentives expect them to live is where much of the quiet politics now sits.

I do not come to this as a neutral observer. I have been married for more than 25 years. My wife and I are raising a daughter. I grew up in a family where my parents separated and divorced when I was very young. I have seen what a long marriage looks like from the inside, and I have seen what distance and instability feel like from the child’s side. Professionally, I spend my days in and around government affairs, where marital status is not just a box on a form. It is a gatekeeper for taxes, benefits, immigration, and health coverage.

Put those worlds together and marriage stops looking like a purely private choice. It looks like a design decision baked into how we distribute security and opportunity.

For much of American history, marriage was about order more than romance. Early American law borrowed English common law, including the doctrine of coverture. A married woman’s legal identity was folded into her husband’s. She had limited independent rights to own property or sign contracts. A marriage brought people together, but it also combined assets, labor, and legal responsibility into a single unit that the state could recognize and govern. Parents and communities understood this. Marriage was an economic arrangement tied to land, inheritance, and work, not only a personal story.

Over time, states formalized that arrangement with licenses and registries. By the early twentieth century, getting married meant the state recorded your union, and that record made it easier to attach rules to marital status, who could inherit, who counted as legitimate family, and who qualified for certain tax advantages and benefits.

The law has become more inclusive since then. Women gained more legal and economic independence. Courts struck down bans on interracial marriage. Same-sex couples won nationwide recognition of their right to marry. Those victories widened access to a powerful institution. They did not shrink the institution’s weight.

If anything, we layered on more benefits and assumptions about marriage even as Americans began living in more varied ways. Marriage moved from being a nearly universal early step into adulthood to something closer to a capstone. People delay it until school is finished, work feels stable, and they feel they can afford a household. The law, however, still mostly assumes marriage is common and early.

The numbers make the change clear. In 1949, roughly 78.8% of households contained married couples. Today, less than half of households are headed by married couples. That share has been below 50% since around 2010 and sits near 47% in recent estimates. Single-person households and cohabiting arrangements now occupy a much larger share of the landscape. At the same time, the median age at first marriage keeps climbing. In 1975, men tended to marry around age 23.5 and women around 21.1. Recent Census estimates put those medians at 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, while USAFacts shows the long decline in married-couple households.

Americans are still marrying, but they are doing it later and less often.

Attitudes have shifted alongside behavior. Pew Research Center finds that about half of U.S. adults are married, while a growing share are single, cohabiting, or otherwise unpartnered. High school seniors still say they expect to marry someday, but the share who are confident they will marry once and stay married has fallen, especially among girls. Other data show that roughly one in four 40-year-old adults has never married.

The picture is not that marriage is over. It is that marriage is less universal, more delayed, and more selective. Cohabitation has gone from stigmatized to normal. Many couples share homes and raise children long before they consider a marriage license. Meanwhile, divorce among older Americans has risen. Recent New York Times reporting on gray divorce notes that the chances of divorcing after age 50 have roughly doubled over the past few decades, and a large share of divorces now involve couples in that age group.

Commentators have built different stories on top of these same trends. Some talk about a “great detachment”, seeing low marriage rates and rising never-married shares as part of a broader drift away from institutions and relationships. Others warn of a crisis, arguing that the married will soon be the minority and that this will weaken social capital and economic stability, as in this New York Times opinion essay. There is also a more upbeat narrative. Recent federal data show marriage rates returning to pre-pandemic levels and divorce rates edging down, and CNN framed this trend as Americans rediscovering the appeal of tying the knot and staying together.

Whether you see decline, crisis, or rebound depends on which slice of the data you emphasize. The underlying numbers are the same.

Where politics enters most directly is in the way the system treats married and unmarried people differently. Marital status runs through the tax code. Married couples can file jointly and often benefit from lower combined tax burdens, especially when their incomes are uneven. Social Security and many employer pensions offer spousal and survivor benefits. Retirement accounts and health insurance plans are structured with spouses and dependents in mind. Immigration law gives special weight to spousal sponsorship. Hospital visitation and medical decision-making default to spouses when families are under stress.

Put together, these rules make marriage a kind of membership card in the way the United States distributes economic security and legal protections. For a cleaner legal overview, the Cornell Legal Information Institute defines marriage as a legal union created by consent and contract, while Nolo’s legal guide to the benefits of marriage summarizes the practical changes involving taxes, estate planning, healthcare, and family rights. The federal baseline is also clearer after the Respect for Marriage Act, codified at 1 U.S.C. 7, which provides that an individual is considered married if the marriage is valid in the state where it was entered into.

Those advantages do not land on everyone equally. Higher-income and higher-educated Americans are more likely to marry, more likely to stay married, and more able to use these rules to build and protect wealth. Lower-income Americans face greater instability, have fewer assets to protect, and are less likely to access the full range of marital benefits. The gap shows up in very practical ways. Two households can have similar needs but very different outcomes because one is headed by a married couple and the other is not.

In my work on healthcare and access, I see how a marriage certificate can unlock coverage or caregiving support, and how its absence can leave committed families exposed to higher costs and fewer options.

This is especially true for families that do not fit the traditional picture. Single parents navigate rules that assume the presence of a second adult in the home. Cohabiting couples who share children and bills still lack many of the automatic protections that come with a marriage license. Multigenerational households, common in Latino communities and many immigrant families, spread responsibility across grandparents, adult children, and extended kin, while policy often only recognizes a married couple at the center.

For these families, the politics of marriage is not a debate about culture. It is a daily question about who the system sees and supports.

Generational change adds another layer. For many in my generation and for my daughter’s peers, marriage looks less like the starting line of adulthood and more like one option among several ways to build a life. It comes after school, after a series of jobs, sometimes after a period of living alone or sharing a place with friends. Cohabitation, blended families, and long-distance relationships are common. At the other end of the age spectrum, couples who married young decades ago are reassessing later in life whether their marriage still fits the lives they now want.

When you step back, the category of family in the United States has diversified. Marriage still matters. It just no longer maps cleanly onto most households in the way our statutes assume.

All of this leaves us with a basic design question. If our laws and benefits treat marriage as the main gateway to security, but Americans are organizing their lives in more varied ways, how much longer can we rely on that old blueprint? One option is to double down and try to pull behavior back toward the model the system expects. That is the impulse you hear when people warn about the financial cost of staying single and call for reviving marriage rates. Another option is to maintain the value we place on commitment and stability, but update how we recognize and support them.

That could mean focusing more on caregiving and dependency, who is raising children, and who is providing support, rather than only on whether two adults have signed a marriage license.

My own experiences do not settle that debate, but they shape how I see it. Growing up with divorced parents taught me that family life does not always match the legal template. Being married for more than 25 years has shown me how much work and compromise go into making the legal template mean something real. Watching my daughter grow up has made the future less abstract. These rules will define the world her peers and she inherits.

The data tell us that American family life has moved ahead of our old assumptions. The politics of marriage is about whether we are willing to let our policy architecture catch up.

If we accept that reality, the next question is not whether Americans should marry more or less. It is who has the power to redesign the incentives and protections we attach to marriage, and who pays the price if we leave them unchanged.

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Every year on July Fourth, the sky tries to tell us a simple story. The fireworks go up, the flags come out, the kids wave sparklers in the dark, and for one night the country looks united. This year, as the United States marks 250 years since the Declaration was adopted in Philadelphia, that surface story sits next to a harder truth. Many people feel the country is tearing at the seams. We argue about institutions, elections, policing, immigration, and who is even allowed to claim that flag. As a Gen X American Latino, born the son of Mexican immigrants and raised in the long shadow of the civil rights movement, I understand that anxiety. I also know we are far from the first generation to feel the country is in trouble, and far from the worst.

The easy way to talk about 250 years is to treat them as a clean march from revolution to prosperity. The real story is messier and more useful. Every generation that has stood under the smoke of Independence Day has lived inside its own crisis and its own fights over who is included in “We the People.” If you walk through a few July Fourths, you see a pattern that matters more than the fireworks: a country that keeps stumbling forward, keeps renegotiating its promises, and keeps widening its sense of “we,” often right when it feels broken.

The first July Fourth, in 1776, was a bet made in the middle of a storm. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia and ordered it printed and distributed, claiming that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” British forces were massing in New York. Colonists were divided between those who wanted to break from Britain and those who warned that rebellion would bring ruin. The Declaration’s words about equality and consent did not match the society outside Independence Hall. Enslaved people had no rights. Women could not vote. Indigenous nations were treated as enemies. But the language they wrote on that parchment became a measuring stick. Every future July Fourth has had to answer whether the country is living closer to those words or drifting further away from them.

Almost ninety years later, the country marked Independence Day in the middle of a war that tore it apart more violently than anything the country had seen before or since. In early July 1863, Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg turned the tide of the Civil War and began to answer a brutal question: could a republic built on slavery survive? The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued months earlier, yet the war’s outcome and the reality of freedom were still uncertain. That July Fourth meant watching the country bleed for the chance to make “all men are created equal” mean more than a sentence written by slaveholders, and it showed again how costly it is to move the country even a little closer to its founding words.

By July 4, 1933, the country faced a different crisis. The Great Depression had crushed the economy. Banks had failed. Unemployment was massive. Hunger and eviction were common. Franklin Roosevelt’s early New Deal began changing what Americans expected from government: emergency relief, public works, farm supports, and new rules for finance. Recovery was partial and uneven, but the federal government had already begun to accept a wider responsibility for basic conditions of life, work, security, and a floor under free‑fall. For Latino workers, including Mexican and Mexican American farm laborers and railroad crews, the picture was mixed. The same period brought mass deportations and “repatriations” of people labeled as Mexican, including U.S.-born citizens of Mexican descent. So when my parents showed up as migrant workers decades later, they were entering a country that had raised the economic floor for some, but still treated their community as disposable when convenient.

My parents knew a harsher version of this country than the one I grew up in. My father was born in Mexico. My mother was born in the United States to Mexican parents, but spent her early childhood in Mexico before returning. They worked as migrant laborers here before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, landmark laws that began to attack formal segregation and protect the right to vote. They saw storefronts with signs that said “No dogs or Mexicans allowed.” They lived with segregated schools and punishment for speaking Spanish from teachers and officials who treated our language as a problem. For them, Independence Day meant watching a country celebrate freedom while their community lived with open discrimination.

The civil rights era shaped my own generation the most. The images we know best focus on Black Americans: bus boycotts, sit‑ins, Freedom Rides, Birmingham, Selma, the March on Washington, and the federal laws that followed. Those struggles rightly shape how we talk about that period, but Latinos were part of that movement too. Farmworkers organized, including the campaigns that came to be known as part of the Chicano Movement. Students walked out of schools in places like East Los Angeles to protest unequal education. Community leaders demanded equal access to education, housing, and the vote. Cases like Mendez v. Westminster challenged segregation of Mexican American children in California before Brown v. Board of Education. Activists in Texas, Colorado, California, and beyond fought English‑only rules and discrimination against Spanish speakers. When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and finally began enforcing protections against discrimination in schools and workplaces, it not only changed the law for Black Americans. It widened the horizon for my parents’ generation as well.

As a kid born after those laws took effect, I grew up in a United States that, at least on paper, recognized my citizenship and my family’s place in the polity in ways it had not always recognized for earlier generations of Mexican and Latino Americans. That change was incomplete and contested, and remains so now. But it expanded the “we” of Independence Day. It made it possible for someone like me to stand under the fireworks and feel that the promises on that parchment were finally meant to include my community, not just as guests but as full participants.

Now we reach July 4, 2026. The United States is celebrating 250 years since the Declaration was adopted. Military jets fly over parades. Fireworks bloom over rivers and stadiums. The headlines leading into this anniversary are not about consensus. They are about polarization, election fights, disinformation, political violence, climate shocks, immigration tensions, racial injustice, and questions about whether institutions are still capable of protecting rights and delivering opportunity. It is easy to feel like the country is more fragile than ever.

That feeling is real. It deserves respect. It also needs context. We are living through a moment of strain, but we are not living through 1776, when the basic idea of self‑government was at stake in a war with an empire. We are not living through 1863, when the country was split into two armies killing each other over slavery. We are not living through 1933, when banks were failing and hunger was everywhere, or through the early 1960s, when children faced attack dogs and fire hoses for trying to go to school. Naming those earlier chapters does not diminish the fights we are in now. It reminds us that this country has confronted darker moments and still found ways to move forward.

For me, as a citizen whose parents worked under those “No Mexicans allowed” signs and still believed this place could be better, patriotism cannot mean uncritical pride. It has to mean caring enough about the country’s shortcomings to want them changed. The earlier chapters suggest that the country gets better when more people insist on being part of that “we.” None of those shifts were automatic. Each required people who were willing to name the gap between promise and reality and then do something about it. The country is more politically and demographically diverse than ever. A 250‑year‑old democracy can become more inclusive, more prosperous, and more resilient, but it will not drift there by accident. It will get there if enough of us, including those whose families arrived after the founding and worked in fields and factories before the law fully acknowledged them, insist that the promises made in 1776 and expanded in the generations since must actually govern how we treat one another now.

On this July Fourth, under the heat and the fireworks, the country is once again writing a chapter that will look obvious in hindsight and confusing in the moment. The people who will decide how it reads are not just on television or in office. They are in neighborhoods, workplaces, congregations, and families. They are immigrants and the children of immigrants, Black, white, and brown, rich and poor, urban and rural, cynical and hopeful. I count myself among them. The promise of this anniversary is not that we can look back and feel satisfied. It is that we can look back, remember how dark previous moments were, see how much work it took to move beyond them, and then choose to do our part now. The story of this country has never been simple. That is exactly why it is still worth telling, and still worth changing.

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I am not writing a column this week. I want to be upfront about that and tell you why.

I write about power, policy, and who pays the cost when institutions fail the people they are supposed to serve. I write about health equity, voting rights, and the gap between what this country promises and what it actually delivers. I do that work because I believe it matters. And I do it consistently enough that a week off feels like it requires an explanation.

It does not. But I am going to give you one anyway.

Rest is not the absence of productivity. It is a prerequisite for it. The research on this is not subtle. Chronic overwork degrades the quality of thinking, narrows perspective, and produces exactly the kind of writing that sounds like it was produced by someone who needed a break. You deserve better than that. So do I.

There is also something worth saying directly: the pressure to always be on, always producing, always present in the feed is one of the more insidious features of modern professional life. I write about systems that grind people down. I should not quietly participate in one.

So this week, I am stepping back. I am spending time with my family. I am reading things that have nothing to do with politics. I am going to watch fútbol and feel zero guilt about it.

The column will be back next week.

In the meantime, if the news cycle does something genuinely outrageous between now and then, and let’s be honest, the odds are not in our favor, I trust you to hold it together until I return.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for being here. See you next week.

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My parents separated when I was a toddler and eventually divorced. I grew up without a steady physical presence from my father. Not because he did not want to be there. Because circumstance made it nearly impossible. We lived in different cities, often in different states. There was no FaceTime, no internet, no technology to bridge the distance the way we take for granted today. The absence was real, and I noticed it. I noticed it at soccer games and track meets. I noticed it at my high school graduation. I noticed it in the moments when I needed someone to teach me how to drive, how to prepare for a first date, how to navigate the things fathers are supposed to help their sons figure out. And yet his presence was constant in a different way. He made sacrifices to stay connected across that distance. I spent summers and holidays with him. He tried. I knew he tried. I just never felt that I fully knew him. This Father’s Day, I am thinking about him. I am thinking about what it costs a family when the infrastructure of life makes presence impossible, and about what this country asks of fathers, and what it refuses to build for them.

In 1909, a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd sat in a Spokane church and thought of her father. William Jackson Smart had raised six children alone after his wife died in childbirth. He was a Civil War veteran with no support system and no policy safety net. He just showed up. Dodd spent years fighting to have that kind of fatherhood formally recognized. Congress mocked her. It took sixty-two years and a presidential signature from Richard Nixon in 1972 for Father’s Day to become federal law. That delay was not incidental. It was a preview of how this country has always felt about the subject.

A century after Dodd’s campaign, the United States still has not decided what it wants from fathers. Two versions exist side by side. The first is the provider: financially dominant, professionally driven, present in the household through what he earns. The second is the engaged father: at drop-off, emotionally available, a consistent presence in his children’s daily lives. The country claims to celebrate the second. It builds policy around the first.

The numbers make that plain. The United States is the only OECD member country without a federal paid parental leave policy. Only thirteen states and the District of Columbia have active paid family leave programs. Thirty-five percent of American fathers take zero time off after a child is born. Sixty-four percent of those who do take leave take less than two weeks. These are not figures about what fathers want. They are figures about what fathers can afford. In this country, engaged fatherhood is a financial decision that most working families cannot fully make.

There is something else built into the system that rarely gets named directly. Economists call it the fatherhood bonus. Men typically see a wage increase of roughly sixteen percent after becoming fathers. It sounds like a reward. It is not. Employers pay fathers more because they expect them to stay at work and leave caregiving to others. It is a market signal telling men that the provider model is the one the economy prefers. Men who reject that signal absorb a real financial penalty. They take the unpaid leave. They restructure their careers. They choose presence over advancement. The system rewards the absence it publicly mourns.

What nobody connects directly is what this costs men beyond their paychecks. Twenty-five percent of young men in this country report chronic loneliness. According to the CDC, men die by suicide at a rate nearly four times higher than women. The conversation about that crisis is growing louder, and it should be. A Northwestern University study published this week found that fathers who lacked access to paid leave were significantly more likely to report depression and anxiety than those who had it. Seventy-five percent of those fathers cited financial barriers as the reason they could not take the time they needed. Being a father is one of the most consistently documented protective factors against the kind of unraveling we keep calling a mystery. But the protection only works when the system actually lets men be present. And for sons, the stakes run even deeper. Children raised without an engaged father are 4.7 times more likely to develop a mood disorder. Emotionally absent fathers produce measurable harm in their sons that carries into adulthood. The country is not just failing fathers. It is producing the next generation of men who will struggle in the same ways, in the same silence.

The downstream consequence is already showing up in the data. Research published this month found that more American men are actively opting out of fatherhood altogether. Working-class and younger men are leading the trend. Among men under forty, the share who say they do not intend to become fathers has risen sharply over the past decade. This is what happens when a system asks men to be present fathers and then penalizes them for trying. At some point, enough men do the math.

For Latino men, this has a specific weight that I know firsthand. Latino fathers consistently rank among the highest in familismo, the deep cultural commitment to family presence and unity that sits at the center of who we are. That value is real. It is practiced every day in kitchens, at kitchen tables, and on Saturday morning games. It is also nearly invisible in every serious policy conversation about parental leave, workplace flexibility, and caregiving support. This is not a Latino problem. But for Latino fathers, the distance between the father our culture demands and the infrastructure America provides makes the failure impossible to ignore.

None of this should obscure what is actually happening in homes across this country right now. There are fathers taking unpaid leave and absorbing the hit without complaint. There are fathers restructuring their careers around their children without anyone asking them to. There are fathers who looked at what their own fathers gave them, found it insufficient, and quietly decided to do it differently. That decision, made without fanfare and without institutional support, is among the most consequential things a man can do. Its effects carry forward for generations.

These are the fathers Sonora Smart Dodd was honoring. Not a symbol. Not a stereotype. The father who stays when staying costs something.

Despite the distance that separates us, my father and I have built a strong relationship. Now I am a father too. I do not have a son. I have a daughter. And one of the things I think about most is what I am modeling for her. Not just how to be loved, but what to look for. What to expect. What to require. Fathers teach their daughters the standard. They show them, through daily example, what a man who chooses presence looks like. That is not a small thing. It is one of the most important things a father can do, and it is just as invisible to policy as everything else in this column.

This Father’s Day, I think about my father. I think about the summers and the holidays and the long distance that neither of us chose. I think about the sacrifices he made across the miles to let me know he was still there. He did not get to teach me everything a father is supposed to teach his son. But he gave me something I did not fully appreciate until now: the understanding that presence is not always measured in miles, and that love does not require a zip code. To him, and to every father doing the hard and often invisible work of staying engaged in a country that makes it harder than it has to be, this column is for you.

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When FIFA held the 2026 World Cup draw in Washington, D.C., the ceremony put leaders from the United States, Mexico, and Canada on the same stage. They were celebrating a tournament eight years in the making, one they had sold to FIFA and to their own publics as proof that North America could organize itself around something larger than its ongoing arguments over tariffs, migration, and trade. The slogan was “Unity. Certainty. Opportunity.” The stadiums were ready. The framework was in place. Then the tournament started, and the people who showed up proved the slogan right.

Mexico opened the entire tournament on June 11 at the Estadio Azteca, beating South Africa 2-0 before a crowd of 80,824, with the first goal coming in the ninth minute. The next day, Canada earned a 1-1 draw against Bosnia and Herzegovina in Toronto, with Cyle Larin’s second-half goal giving Canada its first-ever point in men’s World Cup history. Also on June 12, the United States beat Paraguay 4-1 at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, in front of 70,492 fans. Fifteen million Americans watched on television. Peak viewership hit 18.86 million, the most-watched USMNT World Cup telecast in English-language history. Those numbers did not come from a government projection. They came from people who decided, on their own, that this tournament mattered.

The player at the center of the moment was Folarin Balogun, who scored twice against Paraguay. Balogun is Black, British-born, and American by choice. His jerseys sold out on Nike’s website within hours of the final whistle. Dick’s Sporting Goods moved 300 Balogun home jerseys in a single day. His match-worn shirt is being auctioned for over $7,000. Nobody planned that. No economic impact report projected it. It happened because fans responded to what they saw on the field, and what they saw told them something about the country hosting this tournament that the official messaging had been trying to say all along. Nobody drafted him as a symbol of anything. He just showed up, scored twice, and let the crowd decide what it meant.

The economic picture that has emerged reflects that same energy. Official projections promised billions in GDP for host cities, tens of thousands of supported jobs, and strong visitor spending across the board. The activity that is actually materializing runs through Latino communities in ways the headline forecasts did not fully capture. Sixty-eight percent of Latino adults in the United States expressed a strong interest in attending World Cup events. According to researchers at UCLA and California Lutheran University, the U.S. Latino GDP reached $4.4 trillion in 2024, making it the fourth-largest in the world. Nielsen data shows that Hispanic fans are among the most engaged soccer audiences in the country, over-indexing on viewership, attendance intent, and brand loyalty. The tournament’s financial story in this country is inseparable from that community’s presence, spending, and investment in the outcome.

That community is also carrying the sharpest tension of this summer, and how that tension resolves will say something important about what this tournament ultimately means. The United States made a commitment to FIFA that fans from all 48 participating nations would have access to the tournament. Fans from more than a quarter of those nations now face travel bans, visa denial rates above 40 percent, or outright exclusion. A Somali referee was denied entry to the country. Federal agents have been stationed at venues, and while Trump administration officials have stated there will be no mass enforcement actions at games, the anxiety in immigrant communities is documented. The fans who made it have proceeded with full conviction, filling stadiums and city streets with exactly the spirit the tournament promised, and carrying that promise forward on their own.

The trade backdrop tells a related story. The USMCA review was always the policy parallel to the tournament’s unity narrative, and it is now actively underway. The United States and Mexico held their first bilateral negotiating round on May 28 and 29 in Mexico City, with a second round scheduled for June 16 and 17 in Washington during the group stage. Canada, the third co-host, has been largely sidelined in early sessions, formally requesting inclusion while Washington pursues a bilateral track with Mexico. That detail matters. The three nations sharing a stage at the draw ceremony are not sharing a table in the trade room, and the co-host that earned its first World Cup point in Toronto is waiting for a seat it has not yet been given. The formal joint review convenes on July 1, when the knockout rounds begin.

None of that has slowed what is happening in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Dallas, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Toronto. Fans from 48 nations are moving through host cities across all three countries, eating in local restaurants, filling neighborhoods that rarely see this kind of international foot traffic, and delivering in practice what the bid book promised in theory. Nielsen reports that North America’s soccer fan base has grown nearly 11 percent over five years to more than 136 million people. That growth is not an accident of scheduling. It is the product of communities that have been building this moment for a generation.

The 2026 World Cup was designed as a symbol of North American unity. Three governments built the infrastructure, negotiated the agreements, and positioned the tournament as evidence that this continent could function as something more than three countries in a convenient arrangement. What is happening on the ground confirms that premise. It has always been confirmed by the people who cross borders for work and family and culture every day, by the communities that built something lasting long before any bid was submitted, and by the fans who filled SoFi Stadium on a Friday night and made 15 million strangers feel like they were in the same room.

The people have already voted with their feet. They always do, in politics and on the pitch.

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This week, I cohosted a fundraising reception for James Talarico, the Texas state representative running for U.S. Senate against Ken Paxton. He spoke about justice, community, and what it means to love your neighbor not as a bumper sticker, but as a governing philosophy. He quoted scripture. He meant it. And standing in that room, I felt something I haven’t felt from Democratic politics in a long time: a recognition that people like me belong here too.

I grew up going to church. For more than ten years, I served as a dedicated weekly volunteer for my faith community. My faith is not a political prop. It is the foundation of everything I do professionally and personally. So when I tell you that what Talarico is doing in Texas is one of the most important political developments in this cycle, I am not speaking as a strategist. I am speaking as a native Texan, and as someone who has sat in the pew and wondered why the party I believe in keeps walking past the door.

Democrats have been ceding that ground for decades, and it is costing them everything.

The break between the Democratic Party and people of faith did not happen overnight. It was a strategic slow bleed. Beginning in the late 1960s and accelerating through the culture wars of the 1990s, Republicans made faith a central organizing principle. Democrats retreated. They began treating religion as something to be privately held rather than publicly engaged, and voters noticed. By 2016, Democrats had lost 81 percent of white evangelical voters to Donald Trump. By 2025, polling found that 75 percent of Christian voters of all stripes said they have little or no trust in the Democratic Party. That is not a niche problem. That is a coalition in collapse.

History already shows the path back. Barack Obama made a deliberate faith outreach effort in 2008, and it worked. He gained ground with white evangelicals, improved by nine points among Catholics, and outperformed John Kerry across virtually every religious demographic. He did not change his positions. He changed his engagement, and he showed up where Democrats had stopped going. Then came Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, who won two Senate races in Georgia by making his faith the organizing principle of his politics. Jon Ossoff ran alongside him, and they flipped the Senate in January 2021. The lesson from Obama and from Georgia is the same. When Democrats lead authentically with faith, the tent expands.

Talarico is building on that foundation and pushing it further. He is not simply a Democrat who attends church. He is a seminarian who argues from within the Christian tradition against Christian nationalism. His message is direct: Jesus liberates, Christian nationalism controls. He does not cede scripture to the right. He contests it. His positions on paid family leave, child care, and human dignity are rooted in his Mainline Presbyterian theology, in the Gospel’s call to care for the vulnerable and the stranger. Critics, including supporters of his Republican opponents, have found themselves acknowledging that his faith is genuine. The New York Times called him “a Christian X-ray,” someone whose theology exposes the gap between what the religious right preaches and what it actually practices. That kind of credibility cannot be manufactured. It has to be earned. And it turns out that credibility travels across communities in ways that party strategists never anticipated.

Now look at what it is producing. In 2024, Trump won 55 percent of Latino voters in Texas, sweeping 14 of 18 border counties. Pundits declared the Latino vote permanently in play. Faith was a significant part of that story. Latino evangelicals and conservative Catholics had been hearing Republican messaging about God, family, and community for years while Democrats offered little theological counter. Fast forward to 2026. Current polling shows Talarico leading by 32 points among Latino voters in Texas. Thirty-two points. In the same state where Democrats just lost the Latino vote by double digits two years ago. That is not a minor adjustment. That is one of the most remarkable single-cycle demographic reversals in recent political history, and it did not happen by accident. It happened because Talarico speaks the language.

I know this firsthand. I was baptized Catholic, but as a child, I made the intentional choice to attend Black Baptist churches, and I stayed for years. What I experienced there was not just worship. It was civic life in its most complete form. Organizing, accountability, community care, and political engagement were not separate from the faith. They were expressions of it. Black Americans who attend religious services are significantly more likely to volunteer, contact elected officials, and engage politically. The Black church does not just deliver votes. It builds the trust networks that make sustained participation possible. But when Black Americans disengage from organized religion, research shows they become more likely to drift toward independent or Republican identification. The Black church and the Democratic coalition are intertwined, but neither can take the other for granted. When Democratic candidates show up and treat these communities as partners rather than pre-election ATMs, the infrastructure responds. When they don’t, the vacuum gets filled by someone else.

The Democratic Party has another chance to get this right before November. The party cannot be a big tent if it systematically alienates people of faith, because faith is not a niche constituency. It is the connective thread running through the Black community, the Latino community, and millions of working-class voters that the party has been hemorrhaging for years. When Democrats lose faith voters, they do not lose one lane. They lose the highway.

What Talarico is demonstrating in real time, in one of the reddest large states in America, is that a candidate running an authentically faith-centered campaign can begin rebuilding all of those relationships at once. That is not a coincidence. That is a model. And if Democratic strategists are paying attention, they will stop treating faith outreach as a box to check and start treating it as what it actually is: the foundation of a durable, multiracial, multigenerational majority.

Democrats do not need to become a religious party. They need to become a party that respects religious people, that walks into the sanctuary, listens, and leads with the values they claim to hold.

I stood in that room with James Talarico this week, and I saw what that looks like. It is worth fighting for. And it might just be worth a Senate seat in Texas.

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In 1965, Congress passed Medicare into law and made a promise to older Americans: that the final chapter of life would not be defined by whether you could afford a doctor. Sixty years later, that promise is being tested by a disease that Medicare was never built to handle, one that does not respond to a surgery or a prescription, that takes years to diagnose, and that is now the most expensive disease in America. June is Alzheimer’s & Brain Awareness Month. This year, a ribbon is not a policy.

More than 7 million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer’s disease, and that number is projected to nearly double to 13 million by 2050. The disease costs the United States an estimated $384 billion annually, a figure on a trajectory toward $1 trillion by mid-century. For Latino families, the burden is compounded. Latinos are 1.5 times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s than non-Hispanic white Americans. Roughly 600,000 Latino adults over the age of 65 are living with the disease today, and that number is projected to grow by 832% by 2060. This is not a future crisis. For millions of families in our community, it is already here.

The federal government’s formal commitment to Alzheimer’s began in 2011 with the National Alzheimer’s Project Act, the first law to require a coordinated national strategy to prevent and treat the disease. That bipartisan foundation took years of sustained advocacy to build, and it is what made today’s research infrastructure possible. In February 2026, Congress delivered one of the largest single-year investments in Alzheimer’s research in history: a $100 million increase in the FY2026 spending package, bringing total annual federal research funding to $3.9 billion. The same bill included $41.5 million for the BOLD Infrastructure for Alzheimer’s Act at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the highest BOLD investment since the law was enacted.

What followed is where the story gets complicated. At the same time appropriators were signing those commitments into law, the National Institutes of Health was being restructured in ways that sent shockwaves through the Alzheimer’s research community. In 2025, 14 of 35 Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers were left without funding as NIH deployed significantly fewer research dollars than historical norms. Clinical trials stalled. Researchers were placed in uncertainty. Participants, real people who had enrolled in studies hoping to contribute to a cure, dropped out. What no appropriations table captures is this: science cannot be paused and restarted on a political timeline. When a clinical trial stops, data collected up to that point may be permanently compromised. The participants who leave do not come back. No spending package can buy back what was lost.

The scientific community delivered a genuine milestone. The FDA approvals of lecanemab, sold as Leqembi, and donanemab, sold as Kisunla, marked the first time drugs had been proven to meaningfully slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, with clinical trials showing lecanemab slowed cognitive decline by approximately 27% over 18 months. Medicare now covers both treatments. But coverage and access are not the same thing. Uptake has been far slower than projected because reaching treatment requires a confirmed early-stage diagnosis, specialist involvement, regular infusions, and MRI monitoring, a level of clinical infrastructure that most patients, particularly in underserved communities, simply do not have. The barrier here is not medical. It has been misclassified as one.

The Alzheimer’s Screening and Prevention Act, the ASAP Act, would create a Medicare pathway for blood biomarker screening tests capable of detecting Alzheimer’s markers before a formal diagnosis is possible. Early detection is what makes these new treatments viable. Without it, by the time most patients receive a diagnosis, they are already past the window where intervention can help. In April 2026, HHS Secretary Kennedy publicly called for early Alzheimer’s screening, underscoring the urgency behind the bill. The ASAP Act was introduced with bipartisan support in the House. Now it needs a floor vote.

And through all of it, the funding wins, the research disruptions, the new drugs, the access gaps, the Latino community remains at the margins of the policy conversation despite sitting at the center of the crisis. Latinos are underrepresented in clinical trials. Bilingual care infrastructure is insufficient. Federal health equity frameworks have yet to treat the projected 832% growth in Latino Alzheimer’s cases as the emergency it is. The community I come from is aging into a wave that Washington is not yet taking seriously enough.

Alzheimer’s & Brain Awareness Month should mean something more than a purple ribbon and a social media post. Congress made a historic investment in this fight. It cannot now allow budget proposals to erode the NIH infrastructure that makes that investment meaningful. The ASAP Act must advance. BOLD funding must be protected. And for the families already living with this disease, especially Latino families, the treatments exist. The pathway to reach them does not. Seven million Americans cannot wait for Washington to catch up.

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Most mornings in Virginia begin the same way. Before I grab my keys and head out to drive into D.C., I open my phone and take stock of the day. Not just here. I scroll through a map that stretches across several time zones and two other countries. Heat warnings in Las Vegas, where my mom lives. Storms brewing near Houston, where my dad is. News of rolling blackouts in Havana, where my wife’s family plans around power cuts and summer heat. Headlines from Mexico, where my father and all my grandparents were born. On another screen, alerts flash from the city where I now spend my workdays.

Each notification lands urgently, because each place holds someone I love.

I was born the son of Mexican immigrants in a small Texas town, one of eight children in a family that stretched across houses and states. My parents separated shortly after I was born and eventually divorced. I grew up mostly apart from my father. Both of my parents remarried, which meant new homes, new rules, new last names on the mailbox.

What did not change was the language in the kitchen, the food on the stove, and the feeling that our lives did not match the America described in the textbooks I carried from classroom to classroom.

By the time I graduated from high school, I had attended nine different schools in three states. I started school in Harlingen, Texas, continued in Ventura County, California, and finished in Las Vegas, Nevada. Each move dropped me into a new zip code and a new classroom. Some were in poor neighborhoods. Others sat in middle‑class suburbs. A few were in places that felt wealthy in ways I had only seen on television. Long before acronyms like NCLB were part of the national vocabulary, I saw how public education could look like a launchpad in one district and a dead end in another. One school had newer books and working computers. Another had ceiling tiles stained from leaks and a library that felt frozen in time. For a kid trying to make sense of his place in the country, those differences were impossible to ignore.

Those early years stitched together a map that spanned more than geography. I am Gen X, old enough to remember life before the internet and just as comfortable living inside it now. I have family in Texas, Florida, California, Nevada, and across the border in Mexico. I married a Cubana whose family’s life is shaped by decisions made in Havana and Washington alike. My daily life has never been contained by one city or one country. It has always been a conversation between many.

Maybe that is why I started writing Cultura Unfolded.

When I launched this series, I began with memories and scenes from my own life. I wrote about lowriders and Tejano music, pozole and posadas, caldo and curanderos, the phrases we heard as children and still repeat without thinking. Early pieces like “The Lowrider” and “Caldo, Curanderos y Vaporú” invited readers into rooms I know well: the backyard party where the accordion kicks in and the tías shout “¡Ándale, a bailar!”, the December kitchen where tamales are an all‑day operation, the living room where an altar of photos and marigolds turns grief into a gathering. Those columns were a way of saying: this is what our culture looks, sounds, and tastes like from the inside.

Then the emails and messages started to arrive. Some readers told me the stories felt like home. Others said they were encountering these traditions for the first time. Many admitted they did not know much about the history behind what I was describing. They had eaten tacos and listened to reggaetón, but they had never been taught about the long presence of Latino communities in the United States, the labor that built this country, the mutual aid societies that kept families afloat, or the writers and artists who gave language to our experience.

So the series shifted. Over the past several months, Cultura Unfolded has spent more time laying the foundation. In “Roots and Routes,” we walked through centuries of Latino presence, from Indigenous civilizations and Spanish colonial rule to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Bracero Program, the growth of barrios, and a modern population that now makes up about one in five U.S. residents. In “The Rhythm of Culture,” we followed the sound, from Celia Cruz and Tito Puente to Selena, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, and Shakira, and looked at how our music moved from small stages to global charts. In “The Words We Carry,” we traced storytelling from the Popol Vuh and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton to Sandra Cisneros and contemporary voices. Along the way, we looked at generosity and mutual aid, from early mutualista societies to modern giving circles and pandemic‑era networks, and kept linking to songs, recipes, and organizations so readers could experience the culture directly, not just read about it.

That second phase of the series was intentional. Before asking readers to walk further with me, I needed to make sure we could see the road beneath our feet.

Today, I want to mark the beginning of a third phase.

I am not done with history. There are chapters of our story that remain under‑told, from the role of Afro‑Latino communities to the specific experiences of Central American, Caribbean, and South American migrants in different regions of the United States. There is more to say about art, about schools and curriculum, about work and wealth, about representation and power. Those topics will continue to appear in this space.

But going forward, I also want to bring more of my own path into the frame. Not because this series is about me, but because my life is one of the routes through a much older and wider story. When you grow up one of eight children, moving between households and states, surrounded by extended family spread across four different states and two other countries, you learn quickly that there is no single Latino story. There are many. Cultura Unfolded is my attempt to trace the threads I know best and to honor the ones I am still learning.

In this next stretch of columns, you will see more of the “I” return. Each essay will still do what it has tried to do from the beginning. It will take one anchor, one piece of everyday culture, and unfold it outward into history and context. It will bring in data and dates, policies and programs, so the story is grounded in more than nostalgia. It will continue to point you to the music, recipes, books, and artworks created by Latino artists, cooks, and communities themselves, so you can taste and hear and see what we are talking about. It may start with a memory from a classroom in Las Vegas and lead into a discussion of Latino education history, or with a family group chat during a power outage and end with a list of organizations doing the quiet work of mutual aid.

What will be different is how deliberately I will weave in how I came to these topics and why they matter to me. How a boy sitting in crowded classrooms in Harlingen, Ventura County, and Las Vegas became a man writing about culture, policy, and power from a Virginia suburb. How a family spread across Las Vegas, Houston, Mexico, and Havana shapes the way I read the news and listen for what is left unsaid. How living under many skies at once changes the way you think about belonging.

As I write this, there is a new alert waiting on my phone. It might be another heat advisory in Nevada, rain in Texas, a blackout notice in Havana, or a headline from D.C. that will fill the screens in the city where I work. That mix of places and worries is my normal.

Cultura Unfolded will keep telling our collective story. In this new phase, I hope to let you see more of what it feels like to live inside it.

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Memorial Day did not begin in a government chamber or with a presidential proclamation. It began in the dirt, near graves, with flowers in the hands of people who had nothing left to offer except their grief.

In the spring of 1865, just weeks after the Civil War ended, freed Black men and women in Charleston, South Carolina, organized one of the earliest known Memorial Day observances. They gathered at a makeshift burial site where Union soldiers had died in a Confederate prison camp, gave the men a proper reburial, and held a procession to honor their sacrifice. Historians like David Blight have written that this act of remembrance, led by those who had the most to gain from the Union’s cause, gave birth to what we now call Memorial Day. That origin story is rarely told in full. It should be.

Three years later, in 1868, General John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic formally declared May 30th as Decoration Day, a nationwide call to place flowers on the graves of soldiers who had died in the Civil War. Logan chose the date deliberately, selecting one with no connection to any specific battle, because the point was not to relitigate the war but to heal from it. The first official national observance took place at Arlington National Cemetery, the same grounds where we still bury our fallen today.

For decades, the holiday remained rooted in the Civil War. It was not until after World War I that Decoration Day expanded to honor all Americans who died in any military conflict. After World War II, the name “Memorial Day” gradually replaced “Decoration Day,” and in 1967, it was officially adopted by federal law. Then, in 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, moving the observance from the fixed date of May 30th to the last Monday in May. Veterans’ groups objected to that change, arguing it diluted the solemnity of the original date.

That tension, between commemoration and commerce, between grief and grilling, is the quiet politics at the heart of Memorial Day.

There is no denying the holiday’s economic footprint. This year, AAA projects that 45 million Americans will travel at least 50 miles from home over Memorial Day weekend, setting a new record and slightly surpassing last year’s mark of 44.8 million travelers. Of those, 39.1 million are expected to travel by car and 3.66 million by air. The U.S. Travel Association forecasts total domestic leisure travel spending will reach $909 billion in 2026, part of a sustained post-pandemic surge. The economy clearly moves in step with the holiday.

But the spending data also reveals something about how Americans are feeling. CivicScience survey data from 2025 showed that the share of Americans intending to celebrate Memorial Day dropped slightly, from 63 percent in 2024 to 61 percent, with respondents scaling back alcohol purchases and travel amid economic pressure. The trend reveals something important: even in a country where patriotism is broadly shared, economic anxiety shapes how we honor the day. People still want to show up. They are just doing it closer to home, on tighter budgets, and with less fanfare.

That quiet adjustment may actually bring us closer to the spirit of the holiday than we realize.

Memorial Day has long served as an informal national reset, a moment when, at least in theory, shared sacrifice transcends political difference. In a country now deeply divided along partisan lines, with Americans increasingly viewing political opponents as enemies rather than fellow citizens, the holiday carries a different weight. It asks something of us that our daily political culture rarely does: to think beyond the present moment and toward something larger. The men and women who died in service to this country did not die for a party platform. They died for an idea of America, imperfect, contested, and still being written, but worth defending.

The politics of Memorial Day are not found in congressional speeches or cable news retrospectives. They are found in the choices we make about whose sacrifice we choose to remember. For much of its history, the contributions of Black servicemembers, Latino veterans, women in uniform, and others were either minimized or erased from the official narrative. Recognizing the full breadth of who has served and died for this country is not a political act. It is an accurate one.

This year, as 45 million Americans hit the road and fire up the grill, the most patriotic thing we can do is also the simplest: take a moment to remember why the day exists. Not the sales, not the long weekend, not the unofficial start of summer. The graves, the flowers, and the people who first placed them there.

That act of memory, begun more than 160 years ago by freed men and women in Charleston with nothing but their hands and their grief, is still the truest version of what Memorial Day was always meant to be.

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There is one number in American politics that requires no explanation, no footnote, and no television analyst to interpret. It stares back at you from every corner, every exit ramp, every stretch of two-lane highway from Virginia to Arizona. It is the price of a gallon of gas, and right now, it is telling a story that politicians on both sides of the aisle desperately wish they could rewrite.

The national average has now crossed $4.50 per gallon, driven by more than two months of conflict in the Middle East following the war in Iran, which briefly choked off a significant portion of the world’s oil and LNG supply. The political damage is immediate and personal. Gas prices are one of the few economic indicators that Americans do not need a financial advisor to translate. Research confirms that voters are remarkably accurate at estimating the price of gas in their state, making it a uniquely unmediated measure of how a government is performing. You cannot spin the number on that sign.

Behind that number, however, is a more complicated architecture of control that most Americans never see. A cartel of foreign governments, OPEC+, which includes Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, the UAE, and roughly eighteen other producing nations, collectively manages how much oil flows into the global market. When they restrict supply, prices rise. When they flood the market, prices fall. American presidents, regardless of party, have limited direct authority over this equation. Yet they own the political consequences every time. That dynamic is the quiet foundation of one of the most enduring frustrations in American politics: the single most visible measure of economic well-being is largely set in Riyadh and Moscow, not Washington.

President Trump, who spent years wielding gas prices as a political bludgeon against the Biden administration, most memorably when prices briefly crested $5 a gallon in June 2022, now finds himself on the other side of the argument. His administration is reportedly considering a suspension of the federal gas tax, which has sat untouched at 18.4 cents per gallon since Bill Clinton entered office, a relic neither party has had the courage to touch for over three decades. The reversal is not lost on anyone. When the pump becomes the problem, the party in power scrambles for relief. That is the ruthless arithmetic of American politics.

But reducing the gas price conversation to presidential politics misses the deeper, more consequential story. High gasoline prices do not merely make commutes more expensive. They act like a slow, invisible tax on nearly every dimension of daily life, compounding costs that are already straining working families across this country.

Some assume that electric vehicle drivers are insulated from all of this. They are not. The relief at the pump does not reach the rest of the economy. Consider your grocery bill. Food production is almost entirely energy-dependent. Diesel powers the tractors that work the fields. Energy derivatives are baked into the fertilizers used to grow crops. Fuel moves every refrigerated truck from the farm to the distribution center to your local supermarket, and diesel prices, which run even higher than gasoline, are what actually move those goods. Research shows that a surge in fuel prices significantly amplifies food price increases, with the full effect felt within roughly five months. When the price goes up at the pump, it eventually goes up on the shelf. Perishables get hit first. Families who are already stretching a food budget feel it before anyone else.

Jet fuel costs jumped 56% in March alone, forcing carriers to raise ticket prices and slash their financial outlooks. Manufacturers face an identical calculation. When energy costs rise, factory operators either absorb the losses or pass them to consumers through higher prices on goods ranging from packaging to pharmaceuticals. Medical supply chains, already fragile after years of post-pandemic disruption, are further stressed when fuel costs spike. And it does not stop at the border. A substantial share of the world’s fertilizer transits through the same global chokepoints as oil does, meaning fuel shocks abroad eventually show up in American prices for coffee, cocoa, and a range of commodities we consider ordinary.

For working families with no alternative, who drive older, less fuel-efficient vehicles simply to get to work, the math is far more brutal. The families absorbing the hardest blow are those with the least cushion to absorb any blow at all. A Federal Reserve Bank of New York analysis confirms that lower-income Americans are carrying a disproportionate burden during the current fuel surge. They tend to live farther from their jobs, in communities built around car dependency where public transit is either minimal or nonexistent. For them, a dollar spike at the pump does not mean skipping a road trip. It means choosing between a full tank and a full refrigerator.

Nowhere is this more visible than in California’s Inland Empire, one of the most car-dependent regions in the country and home to one of the largest Latino populations in the United States. A UCLA study published in April found that Latino families in California spend an average of $5,000 a year on gasoline, significantly more than their non-Latino counterparts, largely because Latino workers are more likely to commute long distances and far less likely to have the option of working from home. With gas prices in Riverside and San Bernardino counties now exceeding $6 a gallon, that burden has grown considerably. Rising fuel costs are projected to add an estimated $1,300 to $1,700 to annual household costs in the current price environment. Only 3% of Latinos in California own an electric or hybrid vehicle, meaning the economic pain at the pump lands almost entirely on this community.

The ripple reaches further still. Latino-owned small businesses, landscapers, contractors, food truck operators, delivery drivers, and rideshare operators run on fuel. These enterprises operate on margins that leave almost no room for error, and when transportation and equipment costs surge, they face an impossible choice: raise prices on customers who are themselves struggling, or absorb losses that threaten the viability of the business itself. Rising fuel costs do not just drain household budgets in communities like the Inland Empire. They erode the small business infrastructure that gives those communities their economic footing. There is no clear end in sight, with analysts projecting prices will remain elevated well into the summer.

This is the conversation our politics almost never has, honestly. Gas prices generate enormous sound and fury in Washington, competing press releases, dueling social media posts, carefully staged visits to corner stations, but the debate rarely centers on the people most exposed to the consequences. The working-class families and small business owners in transit-poor suburbs and exurbs, who have no political leverage to match an oil cartel and no financial cushion to outlast a price spike, are the ones left holding the tab.

Because those human costs are real, the political calculus heading into the midterm elections carries genuine weight. Analysts at the Brookings Institution note that the average constituent of a current Republican House member drives 26% more miles than the national average, making fuel costs deeply personal to the very base the GOP cannot afford to alienate. Bloomberg noted this week that gas prices may still define Donald Trump’s second term. That may be the most honest political observation of the year.

Because the pump does not care about ideology. It does not distinguish between the donor class and the day laborer, between the suburban commuter and the Inland Empire contractor filling up his truck before dawn. It reflects, with unflinching clarity, the cost of a world that still runs on oil, controlled in large part by foreign governments, and borne most heavily by the people least equipped to absorb it.

The number on the sign is not just a price. It is a verdict.

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I was raised by amazing women, my grandmother and my mother, who taught me the importance of the role of moms and the sacrifices they make to build a just and caring society. Mother’s Day was never supposed to be about flowers and brunch (although you should definitely do both). In 1870, poet and abolitionist Julia Ward Howe wrote the original “Mother’s Day Proclamation” as a war cry, not a greeting card. She believed that mothers, the women who bore and raised the sons being sent to die on battlefields, had a unique moral authority to demand something better from the people in power. Her vision was political, urgent, and unambiguous. Somewhere between 1870 and today, that vision got buried under flowers and sentiment. But the political power of mothers has never been more powerful and needed.

There are an estimated 85 million mothers in the United States. They are the majority of the electorate’s female population, the primary caregivers in most American households, and the economic engine quietly holding the country together. They are also, by nearly every measurable standard, the constituency that receives the least return on what they give. Understanding that gap is not just a policy exercise. It is a window into what this country actually values, as opposed to what it says it values one Sunday each May.

Start with the economics, because the numbers are stunning. A 2024 study valued the unpaid labor of the average American mother at $140,315 per year. Multiplied across the full scope of women’s caregiving in the United States, that figure reaches $683 billion annually in uncompensated work. These are not abstract calculations. They represent the hours spent managing childcare logistics, caring for aging parents, keeping households functional, and absorbing the responsibilities that, if purchased in the open market, would command serious wages. Instead, they are given away for free, treated as a personal choice rather than a structural contribution.

The financial consequences for mothers are severe. Women lose an average of $295,000 in lifetime earnings because of unpaid family caregiving responsibilities. Meanwhile, the so-called “motherhood penalty” ensures that mothers earn only 74.3 cents for every dollar earned by fathers, a gap that, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, actually widened in 2024. The cruelest irony is what happens on the other side of the ledger. Fathers with children earn 16.5% more than men without children. The same biological fact that costs a woman a quarter of her earning potential earns a man a raise. That is not a natural outcome. It is the product of policy choices made over decades.

Those choices are catching up with the country. According to a 2025 Catalyst survey, more than 455,000 women exited the U.S. workforce between January and August of 2025, and 58% of those departures were not layoffs. Women left because staying had become structurally impossible. Nearly half of all children under six now live in a childcare desert, meaning there is simply no affordable, accessible care option available to their families. Mothers do not leave the workforce because they want to. They leave because the system was never designed to keep them.

Here is where the political contradiction becomes impossible to ignore. Women have voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980. In 2024, a double-digit gender gap persisted in the presidential race. These are not soft numbers. They are some of the most durable patterns in American democracy.

And mothers do not just vote. Research consistently shows that parental engagement in civic life is one of the strongest predictors of whether the next generation participates in democracy at all. Mothers are, in a very real sense, the people who manufacture the next generation of voters. They are the first civics teachers most Americans will ever have. When you underserve them, you are not just making a short-term political miscalculation. You are disinvesting in the long-term health of democratic participation itself.

None of this has stopped the current political moment from taking direct aim at the infrastructure mothers depend on. H.R. 1, the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” enacted in 2025, tightened Medicaid eligibility redeterminations to every six months starting in 2027. This is a bureaucratic change that policy analysts say will result in coverage losses for millions of low-income mothers and their children. Childcare funding remains a perennial budget target with no serious legislative remedy in sight. Proposals circulating in conservative policy circles have explicitly linked declining birthrates to women’s economic independence and suggested the solution is steering women away from careers and toward early marriage. Gen Z mothers, polled earlier this year, gave the current administration low marks specifically on childcare costs, maternal healthcare, and workplace policy. The gap between the rhetoric of Mother’s Day and the reality of the policy environment is not subtle. It is glaring.

Julia Ward Howe understood something that has still not fully landed in the halls of power, the wellbeing of mothers is not a niche issue. It is a proxy for the health of the entire society. When mothers are economically secure, families are stable. When mothers are politically engaged, democracy is more resilient. When mothers are stretched thin, underpaid, priced out of childcare, and locked out of the workforce, everything downstream suffers, children, communities, and the civic fabric that holds the country together.

Mother’s Day, in its original form, was a demand. Not a gift. Not a reservation at a nice restaurant. A demand that those in power stop sending mothers’ children to die, and start building a world worthy of their sacrifice. That demand is more than 150 years old, and it is still waiting for a serious answer.

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After you pay for flowers and brunch, if you are still motivated to do more consider supporting this group. I don’t have any affiliation with them, but they seem like a good org that is fighting to improve these policies.

There are roughly 95 million American households with dogs, cats, birds, fish, and reptiles. That number is not just a lifestyle statistic. It is a political constituency, an economic engine, and a public health asset, and Washington is slowly figuring that out. The legislation moving through Congress right now will determine whether that constituency is treated as the economic and public health force it actually is.

The U.S. pet industry generated $158 billion in expenditures in 2025, a 3.7 percent increase from the previous year, and the American Pet Products Association projects that figure will climb to $165 billion by the end of 2026. When you account for the full multiplier effect across supply chains, manufacturing, retail, and veterinary services, the pet sector contributes $260.5 billion directly and indirectly to the American economy and $174 billion in annual gross domestic product. The sector supports 2.78 million jobs nationwide, spanning veterinarians, groomers, trainers, pet food manufacturers, logistics workers, and a fast-growing pet care services segment. The U.S. pet daycare market alone is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of nearly 9 percent through 2030. These are paychecks in cities, suburbs, and rural counties alike, in an industry that has proven more recession-resistant than most.

Dog ownership expanded in 2025, adding roughly 4 million new dog-owning households and now covering 53 percent of American homes. Cat ownership grew 5 percent year over year, driven largely by Gen Z and Millennials, two generations that are redefining what it means to build a household. Hispanic households represent one of the fastest-growing segments of pet owners in the United States, a demographic trend the pet industry has documented but that mainstream policy coverage has largely ignored. The people behind these numbers are not a niche audience. They are voters, renters, disaster survivors, domestic violence survivors, and seniors living alone, and the policy decisions Congress makes affect their daily lives in ways that rarely generate headlines.

The public health case reinforces why those policy decisions matter. Research published earlier this year found that pet owners in older adult populations show significantly fewer symptoms of depression compared to non-pet owners, and regular interaction with dogs has been associated with lower levels of anxiety. University of California Davis health researchers have documented that dogs specifically reduce stress, ease loneliness, and encourage physical activity, all factors that lower long-term demand on the healthcare system. One study found that 48.78 percent of pet owners reported reduced feelings of anger, depression, and loneliness as a direct result of pet companionship. At a time when Congress debates the long-term solvency of Medicaid and Medicare, that is a public health intervention that costs taxpayers nothing and requires no federal appropriation.

Against that backdrop, the Trump administration made a notable move earlier this year when the secretaries of Agriculture, Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services announced a coordinated federal enforcement effort to crack down on chronic Animal Welfare Act violators and dog fighting operations. AWA compliance among licensed breeding facilities has climbed from 67 percent in 2015 to over 92 percent today, and that enforcement posture enjoys support across party lines.

The Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026, which passed the House on April 30, contains several provisions that directly touch pet owners. Section 12005 establishes new health and vaccination documentation standards for dogs imported into the United States, a meaningful consumer protection measure for the millions of Americans who adopt from abroad. Section 12407 reauthorizes transitional shelter funding ensuring that domestic violence survivors can access safe housing without having to leave their pets behind, a provision that advocates have fought for years to secure. The bill also includes an Animal Welfare Act enforcement reporting requirement for licensed dog breeding facilities, adding a layer of transparency to an industry that has historically operated with limited public accountability. The legislation now moves to the Senate, where advocates are pressing for additional companion animal protections to be strengthened before final passage.

Congress is also moving on standalone companion animal legislation that reflects a different kind of political energy. The PETSAFE Act of 2026, introduced in February with bipartisan backing from Representatives Judy Chu, Brian Mast, and Dina Titus, along with Senator Adam Schiff, would expand emergency management funding so local governments can protect pets during disasters. The bill would raise the federal cost share for animal-related emergency preparedness from 50 to 90 percent, lowering a real barrier for smaller and lower-income jurisdictions. It was introduced in the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires, when tens of thousands of pet owners faced the devastating choice of evacuating without their animals.

On the housing front, a quieter but meaningful policy shift is underway. Several states have moved in 2026 to restrict or ban blanket “no-pet” clauses in rental leases. Washington, D.C. passed its Pets in Housing Act late last year, banning discriminatory pet policies and launching the city’s first pet-friendly homeless shelter. Congress also appropriated $3 million through the PAWS Act grant program to help domestic violence shelters become pet-friendly, because survivors have long delayed leaving dangerous situations when they cannot bring their animals. These are practical wins that touch real lives, and they drew bipartisan support.

Pets occupy a unique space in American political life. More than 500 animal welfare bills were introduced across state legislatures in January 2026 alone, reflecting the intensity of public interest rather than any lobbying blitz. The Senate now has an opportunity with the Farm Bill to strengthen the companion animal protections that pet-owning households across the country depend on. Ninety-five million households are paying attention, whether or not they know it yet.

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Before there were cities or borders, before there were passports or papers, there were stories. For Latinos in the United States, the power of story is not just a cultural tradition. It is a lifeline, a map, a home built from words when every other home feels uncertain. I know this not from a textbook but from the kitchen table where I grew up, the son of Mexican immigrants who carried their history in their hands and their hearts long before they ever wrote it down.

Every family has its storyteller: the abuela who remembers the old country, the tío who spins tall tales after dinner, el primo who can make you laugh and cry in the same breath. In Latino culture, storytelling is communal. Stories are passed around the table like dishes, everyone takes a turn, everyone adds a pinch of their own spice. They teach children how to greet their elders, how to cook arroz con pollo, how to pray when the world feels too big. They are the first lessons in language, in identity, in love. I am here. My story matters. I am not alone.

For those who have crossed borders, by choice or by necessity, stories are bridges between worlds. They carry the taste of mangoes from a childhood backyard, the sound of rain on a tin roof, the ache of missing someone left behind. “Where are you from?” is never a simple question, and the answer is always layered. I was born here, but my family is from there. My heart belongs to both. Through stories, Latinos learn to navigate the hyphen in Mexican-American, Cuban-American, Salvadoran-American, and others to claim both sides and live in the in-between.

The roots of Latino storytelling in the United States do not begin with immigration. They begin long before borders were drawn, in the oral traditions of the Maya, the Aztec, and the Inca, in creation myths and corridos, in the codices of peoples who understood that to record a story was to protect a life. The Popol Vuh, the K’iche’ Maya creation narrative, is one of the great literary texts of the Americas, a reminder that Latino storytelling was already being told. When we speak of a tradition that stretches from indigenous oral history to a Broadway stage, we are not tracing a straight line. We are tracing a survival.

The nineteenth century brought new voices into that survival. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, born in Baja California and raised under Mexican rule, became the first Mexican American author to write and publish novels in English, giving voice to the dispossession of Mexican Californians after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in works like The Squatter and the Don. She wrote with unflinching clarity about land, belonging, and the cost of conquest at a time when those stories were not welcome. Her work is the literary bridge between the pre-Columbian world and the modern Mexican American experience, and she deserves to be far better known than she is. By the time José Martí, the Cuban poet and revolutionary, spent years in exile in New York writing of the immigrant experience in a city that was brilliant and indifferent in equal measure, the tradition of Latino resistance through storytelling was already generations deep. His vision of Nuestra América, a shared Latin identity that transcended national borders, still echoes in the hearts of those seeking belonging in the United States. Julia de Burgos, the Puerto Rican poet, blazed with equal force, her verses filled with the pain of exile and an unshakeable sense of self. “yo soy la vida, la fuerza, la mujer” she wrote, claiming her identity in a world that tried to silence her. Her legacy lives on in every Latina who dares to speak her truth.

It is also worth acknowledging that the writers who shaped the U.S. Latino literary tradition did not develop in isolation from the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine master, gave the entire tradition of Latin American storytelling a new architecture, his labyrinthine short stories dismantling linear narrative and opening the door to a literature that could hold myth, memory, and reality all at once. Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian Nobel laureate, walked through that door with One Hundred Years of Solitude and changed what was possible in fiction, his magical realism rooting the extraordinary in the deeply ordinary of Caribbean life and giving U.S. Latino writers a model for honoring the spiritual and the surreal within their own communities. Juan Rulfo and Octavio Paz approached that identity from opposite angles, Rulfo through the haunted silence of rural Mexico in Pedro Páramo, Paz through the psychological excavation of The Labyrinth of Solitude, and both gave Mexican American writers a richer language for understanding themselves. Pablo Neruda gave U.S. Latino poets the proof that poetry could hold the weight of an entire people’s struggle without losing its beauty. And Isabel Allende, the Chilean-born novelist who has made her home in California for decades, showed Latina writers that a woman’s voice could carry history, magic, and politics simultaneously, that the center of a sweeping story could be female without apology. None of these writers told the U.S. Latino story. But they helped those who did find the courage and the language to tell it.

The 1960s and 70s brought a flowering rooted in the soil of the Chicano Movement. Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima gave young readers in rural New Mexico a mirror for questions of faith, identity, and the clash between tradition and change, its curandera Ultima carrying the wisdom of a pre-colonial world into the modern one. Tomás Rivera’s ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him gave voice to Mexican American farmworkers in spare, powerful language that owed a direct debt to Rulfo’s stripped-down vision of rural Mexican suffering. Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street showed that the smallest stories, a girl’s longing for a house of her own, a neighbor’s quiet heartbreak, can contain the universe. These books are not relics. They sit on classroom shelves today, waiting to spark something in a child who may one day write her own. It was also during this era that Gloria Anzaldúa began developing the ideas that would define a generation. Her landmark work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, published in 1987, examined the Chicano and Latino experience through the interlocking lenses of gender, identity, race, and colonialism. Anzaldúa wrote in both English and Spanish, refusing to translate, refusing to apologize, insisting that hybrid language is not a liability but a testament to a life lived fully on both sides of a line someone else drew. For anyone who has ever felt caught between two worlds, her words are a declaration of belonging.

Meanwhile in New York, the Nuyorican Poets Café became a birthplace of spoken word. Pedro Pietri, Miguel Piñero, and Piri Thomas used poetry as both protest and celebration, blending Spanish and English, humor and rage, memory and vision. Pietri’s Puerto Rican Obituary remains a searing elegy for the working-class Puerto Ricans who built New York but were too often made invisible. New York in that era was also producing novelists. Oscar Hijuelos, whose 1989 novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love made history in 1990 when it became the first novel by a United States-born Hispanic writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Its story of two Cuban brothers chasing the American dream through music cracked open a door that had been shut for far too long.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries brought new voices from across the diaspora. Julia Alvarez’s novels follow Dominican families navigating the distance between the island they left and the country that received them, often with more complexity than welcome. Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a whirlwind of Spanglish, Dominican history, pop culture, and heartbreak. Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban gave literary voice to the fracture between the island and the Cuban diaspora, holding in a single family the full weight of revolution, exile, and the longing for a home that no longer exists in the form you remember it. Reyna Grande’s memoir The Distance Between Us is an intimate account of a childhood split between two countries and the mother she barely knew on either side of that distance. Luis Alberto Urrea, born on the border and raised between two countries, writes about the Mexican American experience with raw honesty and lyrical beauty. His novel The House of Broken Angels and his Pulitzer Prize finalist The Devil’s Highway, a harrowing account of migrants lost in the Arizona desert, insist that every life that crosses that border is worthy of being mourned, celebrated, and remembered. The canon keeps expanding still. Angie Cruz, Erika L. Sánchez, and Elizabeth Acevedo write for a generation that navigates family expectations and American pressures in two languages simultaneously. Afro-Latino writers like Elizabeth Acevedo and Natasha Díaz are also insisting on something the tradition has sometimes overlooked: that Blackness and Latino identity are not in tension but intertwined. In 2022, Javier Zamora published Solito, a memoir recounting his journey as a nine-year-old boy migrating alone from El Salvador to reunite with his parents in the United States, one of the most widely read Latino books of recent years and a story that has quietly changed how America understands the human face of migration. What ties all of it together is not genre or geography. It is the same impulse that drove a grandmother to tell stories by firelight: we are here, we remember, and our lives are worth telling.

Poetry has always been at the pulse of Latino storytelling, in the corridos sung by Mexican revolutionaries, the décimas at Puerto Rican gatherings, the prayers whispered before sleep. The poet is not a distant figure but a neighbor, a relative, a friend. In 2015, Juan Felipe Herrera, the son of Mexican migrant farmworkers, became the first Latino ever appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, a milestone that arrived nearly eighty years after the position was created. His poetry, rooted in the Chicano experience and alive with bilingual rhythm, carried the weight of every voice that had been left out before his. Ada Limón, the first Latina to hold that distinction, followed, writing with clarity and compassion about nature, family, and survival, finding beauty in the ordinary and hope in the face of loss. Together, Herrera and Limón represent not just two poets but a reckoning: the country’s highest literary honor, finally held by people who look like the communities that have always been part of its story. Natalie Diaz, Mojave and Latina, won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2021 for Postcolonial Love Poem, her work living precisely at the intersection where indigenous identity and Latino experience meet, where the pre-Columbian oral tradition this column began with comes full circle into the present. Martín Espada, often called “the Latino poet of the people,” turns the dignity of labor and the lives of immigrant workers into hymns. In his poem “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100,” he honors the immigrant workers who died in the World Trade Center, their names turned into something that refuses to be forgotten.

Performance carries these traditions forward and outward. Spoken word collectives from Chicago’s Louder Than a Bomb festival to Los Angeles’s La Palabra series are incubators where young poets experiment, collaborate, and find community. On stage, playwrights like Luis Valdez, whose Zoot Suit brought Mexican American history to Broadway, and Quiara Alegría Hudes, who co-created In the Heights with Lin-Manuel Miranda and won a Pulitzer Prize for Water by the Spoonful, have expanded what American theater can hold. And then there is John Leguizamo, who has spent decades doing something few performers have the courage or the range to attempt: telling the full, complicated, hilarious, and heartbreaking truth of Latino life on stage, alone, in front of an audience. His 1990 one-man show Mambo Mouth put seven distinct Latino characters on the New York stage at a time when that kind of representation was virtually nonexistent. Decades later, Latin History for Morons, his Tony-nominated Broadway show, was born from a deeply personal place: his son came home from school having found almost no Latino figures in his history textbook, and Leguizamo, furious and heartbroken, turned that absence into art. The show asks audiences to reckon with how much Latino history has been deliberately left out of the American story. That Leguizamo has built a career turning that erasure into theater is itself an act of resistance and love.

And yet the stage, however grand, is only one place where this story gets told. For too long, Latino students in American schools opened textbooks and found their lives missing from the pages. The quiet revolution of including Latino literature in the curriculum is still gathering strength, and it matters enormously. Literature does not live apart from the world it describes. I’ve spent more than two decades at the intersection of politics and community, and the lesson that never changed is this: representation matters. What is true in the halls of Congress is true on the page. When Latino children see themselves in books, when their languages are not treated as obstacles but as gifts, when their histories are taught with the same care and weight as anyone else’s, something shifts. Not just in them but in all of us. Literature, like policy, has the power to change what people believe is possible. As long as there are people who refuse to be forgotten, the tapestry grows richer, louder, and more beautiful. We remember. We endure. We create.

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