Una buena vista de Lamine Yamal
By 
Buena Vista is small mountain town in the central Colorado Rockies, between South Park and the San Luis Valley. We spend a lot of time there in the summer, and this weekend I had the following experience. At the intersection of Main Street and the state highway that runs through the town, I saw a teenage kid, rather mestizo looking, wearing a Lamine Yamal jersey.
Lamine Yamal is a 17-year-old from the suburbs of Barcelona, who is already one of the best soccer players in the world. His mother was born in Equatorial Guinea, and his father is from Morocco, so he has to say the least an unusually eclectic ethnic background for a Spanish soccer player. He is also Muslim, which is becoming much more common in the country, although Muslims still only make up around 5% of the total population.
So Yamal represents various significant kinds of diversity in his own cultural context, and I was heartened by the sight of his jersey in a small largely white town in the middle of the Rockies.
The next day, at the very same street corner, I saw a pickup truck being driven by a middle-aged white man with a ZZ Top/Duck Dynasty style beard. The truck had two Trump bumper stickers, plus one that said something like “Honk Again, I’m Reloading!” plus a stencil message on the back window that said “Speak English or Get Out.”
BTW, Chaffee County, where Buena Vista is located, swung more toward Harris and away from Trump than any other county in the entire country in last fall’s election.
Anyway I found this contrast striking, not least of all because Buena Vista means “good view” in Spanish, and the town is just north of the San Luis Valley, which featured pretty much nothing but Spanish speakers, along with members of the Ute tribe, until after Colorado became a state.
Although the analogy is too glib, the future of America is between a small town kid in a Lamine Yamal jersey, and a pickup truck covered with nativist slogans (another one I saw that day on another pickup truck was a silhouette of an AR-15 with “Don’t Worry, I Identify as a Crossbow” written underneath).