Hispanic Fanatic

Yes, I’m as guilty as any other white-collar worker of bitching about office politics, inane corporate policies, and clueless colleagues who walked straight out of Dilbert.

But at least there is a pretty good likelihood that I will not get killed at my desk. Of course, my odds would be better if I weren’t Hispanic.

That’s because a recent study found that Latino workers are 18 percent more likely to be killed on the job than workers of any other racial/ethnic group.

So it’s bad enough we Latinos have a tougher time getting a job in the first place. Now it looks like once we are gainfully employed, we have to punch in next to the Grim Reaper.

Why is this? Well, the chief reason is because Hispanics are heavily represented in the construction and landscape industries. And those are dangerous gigs.

It’s even more lethal if you are an immigrant worker, who experience the highest risk of death on the job. Those would be the same immigrant workers who are, you know, destroying America by stealing jobs and launching crime sprees and raping people nonstop (at least in Donald Trump’s world).

In any case, the report is even more troubling because it shows that the number of people who die while working continues to decline each year… but not if they’re Hispanic.

It makes you wonder about a system that exploits undocumented workers, puts them at an increased risk of death, and then, quite literally, adds insult to injury by blaming them for every possible social ill (even though there is rarely any data that validates this viewpoint).

I would go on about this grotesquery, but I’m getting a little nervous about working at my computer, being Latino and all.

So if you need to talk to me, I’ll be cowering under my desk.

At my day job, we recently had a brainstorming session. We had to come up with ideas for an industrial video to illustrate abstract psychological concepts, which is primarily what I write about for my company. It’s a niche living.

The videos are set in white-collar environments, and we try to make them as diverse as possible. This is why each vignette is so perfectly balanced in regards to gender, race, and ethnicity that viewers are forced to marvel at this workplace nirvana of cultural harmony.

Still, it has led to some borderline deceitful behavior. For example, our last Hispanic character was played by a very dark Jewish man. We simply couldn’t find a local Latino thespian.

In any case, we were discussing casting for the latest video when the Bitca informed us that we were running short on older, white male actors. It seems that we’ve used them all in previous videos.

I found this shocking. How can you run out of old white guys? Is there a shortage that I haven’t been informed of? Are they endangered within the general population?

We discussed having an open casting call, and this caused me to picture hordes of white men in business suits, hanging around parking lots, all of them just waiting for that truck to drive up and offer them acting gigs for the day. The men would jostle each other for the opportunity to be trabajadores, and they would climb into the back of the truck, where someone would hand them fake IDs and tell them the job was cash only, under the table. And then they would sweat under the hot lights of the set, avoiding the suspicious glares of the director and sound technicians and boom operators. Then they would do it all the next day.

Ultimately, it’s true: these guys are just taking the acting jobs that no one else will take.

At my white-collar bastion of normalcy, the day job, one of my filing cabinets is off its hinges. It hangs askew but is otherwise functional. I believe that its aesthetic ugliness is not worth the hassle to get it fixed.

One of my co-workers, however, noticed the damage, provoking her to say, “What is it with you Hispanics? If it’s not cars on blocks on the lawn, it’s busted filing cabinets in the office.”

In light of this observation, I will henceforth refer to this woman as the Bitch In The Cubicle Adjacent, or the BITCA. It forms an acronym so descriptive that it’s almost redundant.

But allow me a moment of clarification and perhaps confession. I don’t really think she’s a bitch. In fact, BITCA is my best friend in the place. But when I told her I was starting a blog, she declared that she would soon insult me in the hopes of snagging a mention on the site. She even told me she wanted to be referred to as a bitch, and she seemed rather overjoyed at the possibility of internet notoriety.

I broke it to her that a plain insult wouldn’t do, because we do that to each other every day and, more important, it wouldn’t relate to the theme of this blog (i.e., Hispanicness, Latinotude, etc.). So she vowed to come up with something racial.

Bear in mind that this is a white woman raised in Montana. My contribution to her cultural awareness so far has been teaching her the phrase “Hola, vato!”

But she followed through on her vow. And she has succeeded in making me write about her, although her insult was strained from the start because I could tell she was just reaching for something inflammatory. It lacked sincerity and vituperation, but it got the job done.

In any case, I will write more about the BITCA in the future. But she can consider herself fully introduced.