This column originated from Sol del Valle and has been translated for English readers.
A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to take a road trip from Colorado to Florida. After a few months, the return trip was inevitable. The route through the southern United States — more than 6,000 miles roundtrip — took us several days and corresponding nights of constant transit, stopping at gas stations and rest areas to check the condition of the truck and to ease the natural fatigue of such a long journey.
The trip filled me with new impressions. Venturing down roads adjacent to the major highways, passing through small towns — some of which seemed to once have been culturally and economically significant cities — now frozen in time, preserving remnants of French and Spanish cultural heritage mixed with Anglo-Saxon influence, resulting in a very particular form of slang, worldview, customs… and undeniably good culinary taste.
We crossed major southern rivers and wetlands, such as the Mississippi and the countless basins formed around it, creating one of the most important natural ecosystems in the country. It’s a place where countless artists have found inspiration: B.B. King, Truman Capote, Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams and Jeff Buckley — who even gave himself over to the mysterious waters of one of these Mississippi basins.
Talking about the southern United States is talking about endless plots of land and livestock fields, forming a landscape where New Mexico’s ranches and Texas’ vast sorghum, wheat and corn crops mix with wind turbines and solar panels. It reflects a clash of our human realities: the dichotomy between technological demands of modern life and our basic biological needs.
Today, eating and browsing the internet have become equally necessary. Amid hats, horses, the usual weapons of the southern inhabitant, signs for hotels, restaurants, marijuana dispensaries and patriotic, military recruitment billboards, I felt a deep cultural shock, even though my homeland’s anthem has always invoked war. Just recall the line: “Oh, dear homeland! Heaven gave a soldier in each of your sons” (¡Oh, patria querida! que el cielo un soldado en cada hijo te dio) — and it continues — “War, war! in the mountains, in the valleys, let the horrid cannons thunder.” (¡Guerra, guerra! en el monte, en el valle, los cañones horrísonos truenen.)
Navigating the small southern roads means coming face to face with the strongest contrasts in the world’s largest economy and one of the most influential political-economic empires in human history.
For a region that is arguably the poorest in the country, those contrasts become even more severe. As in the Roman Empire or Pharaoh’s Egypt, inequalities are constant, latent, unbearable. I once asked someone of Mexican origin why they thought the southern U.S. was poorer than other states like Colorado. Their response, full of prejudice and racism, was summed up in a single phrase: “The people who live here — referring to Colorado — actually work.”
Talking about poverty has become a kind of taboo for some of the country’s inhabitants, who often attribute it to supposed excessive state support or a lack of will to “get ahead” on the part of the southerners, particularly among minorities. They ignore the real causes: inequality, lingering racism and aggressive policies toward historic minorities — Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and currently, Latinos.
Even media outlets like Euronews have covered the issue from their own perspective, with headlines like: “The poorest state in the U.S. rivals Germany,” referring to Mississippi’s per capita GDP. These pieces aim to exalt the economic power of the United States — which is, without a doubt, undeniable — but ignore and omit the reality of the common resident of that region.
According to a recent report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the main causes of poverty in the Mississippi Delta states are “the sharecropping system, Jim Crow laws, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a minority white population, the political disenfranchisement of Blacks and the nearly total social segregation of the races” which it describes as “well documented” and “generally viewed as the most significant factor in the region’s present position as among the poorest, if not the poorest, section of the nation based on virtually every socioeconomic measurement.” Here, talking about a lack of will to progress makes no sense. Systemic racism is more than evident.
On this trip, I didn’t just cross a large part of the country and three different time zones. I also encountered local warnings like: “Don’t go into that bar; they’re white extremists,” or “In that place, they’ll treat you badly for being Latino or because of your accent.” I never wanted to find out if it was true. I took it as a fact.
I met people who had bumper stickers on their cars showing, for example, the silhouettes of the characteristic hoods of the KKK, the Confederate flag, images of nooses, slogans like “immigrants out” or the classic “no dogs or Mexicans,” replaced by “yes dogs, no Mexicans.”
As the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos rightly states, “When the individual places themselves below the ‘non-being,’ they consider themselves beneath the ‘non-human.’ This ontological positioning allows the individual who is above the ‘non-human’ to commit all sorts of injustices that, in reverse, would be unthinkable.”
At that point, I accepted it as a truth: that openly racist and absurd behavior still exists, and I simply let it run its course.