Carlos Morales: victim of attacks on Latino immigrants
from the Report “Climate of Fear” by the Southern Poverty Law Center
Carlos Morales, a Latino immigrant community organizer in Suffolk County, was one of only two victims who agreed to give their full names. Morales, 30, came from Mexico City in 1998. When he first arrived, he was homeless. He slept outside in cardboard boxes, often behind a church in Farmingville. In 1999, when the immigrant-bashing organization Sachem Quality of Life was at the height of its power, Morales was run over by a car and beaten in one of the area’s first anti-immigrant attacks.
Here is how he tells his story:
The laundromat where I worked closed at 10:30, and around 11 at night, I was riding home on my bike. I was crossing the street and there was a car coming. First, they stopped for me to cross the street, and then, when I am crossing, they ran me over. When I fell on the ground, they got out of the car and kicked me. They took baseball bats out of the back of their car. They hit me on my knees, in the face, on my back. One of them put his foot on my mouth and said, “You should go back to where you come from, you dirty Mexican.” And he continued to hit me.
There is a bar nearby, and the people at the bar heard the noise and came running out. The [attackers] got in their car and drove away. They left me in a bad state — on the ground, really beaten. The people that came out of the bar called the police and the ambulance came and got me.
I remember when I was in the ambulance, the [paramedic] who was putting the sheet on me, he said to me: “This happened to you because you are here. If you were not here, this would not have happened.” He said it in a sarcastic way because he did not like that I was a Mexican. I remember his face because he was laughing at me. It is something I will never forget because I could not say anything. I was hurt, and he was the one with the ambulance. When I was learning English, I could understand a lot of things but I couldn’t speak well, I couldn’t say what I really wanted to say.
The ambulance brought me to the hospital. I was there with a dislocated shoulder and fractured knees, both knees fractured. I still have knee problems. When it is really cold, I have a lot of pain in my knees. Also, I lost my two front teeth when they hit me in the mouth with a baseball bat.
That was my first experience of racial hate. I had heard of other attacks. I knew people who had been attacked but I didn’t think it would happen to me, especially not in this way. I had experienced other incidents, like customers in the laundromat giving me looks where you know you’re not welcome. But I never thought it would reach this level, that people could have so much hate, to beat you so much, so hard.
No one was ever arrested.
In the beginning, it affected me in a negative way because I felt a lot of anger. I started to feel like all Americans are bad people. You cannot trust them. It changed the way I was. I was always ready to fight. I turned into a very defensive person with other people. I was like that for about two years, I think, really angry with people, always thinking to do the same to other people that they had done to me. But after two years, I started working in the community, and I began to get better. Now, whenever I am walking or riding my bike, I always try to stay alert and see if there are witnesses around or not.
I try to convince people who are attacked to come forward with their own stories, but it’s hard to bring them out. The majority of people don’t tell these stories outside of the [immigrant] community. Inside the community, you hear the new stories that are happening almost every day, constantly, in one form or another. For someone that does not know what it’s like for us, they would think that all the stories were invented, but these are the things that happen to people every day.
