Emi, my mom, was ready. She had printed out a sample ballot and filled in her selections. Her chuleta, she called it, a nod to cheat-sheets Venezuelan children use when they’re studying for tests. Three pages of candidates and propositions, going all the way from President of the United States to community college trustees.
My mother, 71, did have a child-like quality to her as she held her chuleta to her chest on top of a manila envelope, waiting in line for early voting at Wheatsville, one of our local, Austin grocery stores turned into a polling place. Inside the envelope she had brought her voter registration card and naturalized citizen paperwork. I had told her that all she needed was her driving license, but she insisted—she wanted to have proof, in case something came up.
She had only just become an American earlier this year, on a hot February day in Texas, after she swore the Oath of Allegiance at the Austin Courthouse. It was me, my wife, Brittani, my six-month-old daughter, Ona, and my father, Manuel, along with hundreds of other people’s family members serving as witnesses for the naturalization oath. Toward the end of the ceremony the judge called out the countries represented by the people eager to become Americans. I was afraid it would feel like erasure: you are no longer Nigerian, Pakistani, Ecuadorian, Laotian, Canadian, Venezuelan. But it felt like a welcoming, you are who you are, where you came from, and now you’re also part of this. At a time when it’s easy to be cynical about the great American experiment, the ceremony felt like a much-needed breath of fresh air.
Our early voting location was crowded, the line at least 30 people deep. The mercury had hit the low 90s, a record for late October. But nobody seemed to mind. A mother and her teenage son stood in front of us. I wondered if he was 18, if maybe this was his first time voting, too. But the mustache was too wispy, the pimples too many. It was just a mom, bringing her son to vote with her.
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Over the past few months, I’ve been touring with my debut novel, Freedom Is a Feast, where I tell the story of a Venezuelan family torn apart by a country that seems bent on making the lives of its citizens as hard as possible. At book events, I most often read what I call “the election scene.” It’s 1998, Venezuela is about to elect the leftist Hugo Chávez, a candidate who has been able to tap into popular discontent over the inequality that has plagued Venezuela for years, decades, maybe even since its inception as a country. My character, Emiliana, a guerilla fighter in her youth, is in her 60s and dying of cancer. She knows this is the last time she will cast her vote. With the help of her daughter, they make it to the polling station, bringing her six-year-old grandson, Eloy, in tow. Emiliana carries Eloy with her into the voting booth and shows him how to vote. He places the ballot, marked for Chávez, in the box. We all now know what the promise of Chávez devolved into. Venezuela, after 25 years of Chavista Party rule, is considered by everyone, except the most extreme of actors, as a terrible dictatorship. Just this past July electoral fraud kept Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s successor, in power and has spurred a wave of violence and political repression that resulted in, at least, dozens dead, and thousands wrongly imprisoned.
Still, that scene is perhaps my favorite in the whole book. It has something to do with the purity of it. Just a grandmother, bringing her grandson to experience democracy for the first time. Like the mom and son in front of us, heading to their voting machine. And in a flipped, strange way, like my mother and me.
For months now, Trump has been using Venezuelans as the boogeyman. Watch out! Venezuelan gangs have taken over apartment complexes in Colorado. Beware! The Venezuelan government is rounding up criminals and depositing them at the U.S.-Mexico border to infiltrate us. These repeated falsehoods are finding a welcome audience. Even a good portion of my own community of Venezuelans living in the U.S., who are flocking to Trump. It’s hard to understand how they’re blind to how alike Trump is to Chávez and Maduro. They might occupy opposite sides of the political spectrum, but they are all authoritarian populists. My great fear is that, if Trump wins, there will be an accelerated, systematic chipping away of our democracy.
That little by little; one Supreme Court justice at a time; a bit of erosion to the Voting Rights Act here, to the Civil Rights Act there; a few pieces of new legislation; a few policies later; we will find ourselves in a country where elections are not as fair as they used to be. Where naturalization oath ceremonies no longer have names like Restrepo or Adeyemi or Zhao or Farooq. Where women have nowhere to turn for lifesaving procedures, if it has anything to do with their wombs. I hear Americans say, “That could never happen here. We have guardrails. We have institutions.” I’ve heard it before. I remember family and friends saying that Venezuela would never “turn into Cuba.” And now here we are, with Cuba running Venezuela’s intelligence agencies. I can say this. It’s never a single flip switch. You don’t lose democracy in a day. It’s step by step. Whether in power or not, Trump has had eight years in the political spotlight, chisel in hand. He wants four more, and we all know he will want more after that.
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But hope remains. Going to vote with my mom still felt like democracy. In her accented English, she told the poll workers it was her first time voting in America. They cheered for her. It made my heart grow and I teared up, se me aguó el guarapo, as we say in Venezuela. My mom was nervous about operating the electronic voting machines, so when the poll worker asked her if she wanted my assistance, she said yes. They made me recite the assistant’s oath and sign a form, promising to respect and protect her vote, without influence.
I almost chuckled. She had raised me—was raising me still, perhaps, because when does that really end—as a good person, a good citizen. If there was any influence being levied it was hers and my father’s, who for years showed me by word and example what it was to fight for one’s country.
