When Erica Padilla-Chavez and her family opened the door of their Soledad home one day last summer, there in plain view was a giant Trump flag draped over some kind of animal cage. If they themselves were Trump supporters, perhaps they wouldnât have thought anything of it. If the owner of the cage and the flag had instead expressed their views through a lawn sign, again, maybe they would have brushed it off.
But discrimination is a strange thing. To know what it is, it has to be rooted in your lived experience of being treated unfairly because of things you cannot change about yourself, like identity or familial background. And for Padilla-Chavez, that lived experience came partly from working to increase the well-being of low-income, mostly Latino families as executive director of Pajaro Valley Student Assistance.