LatinXcellence: Emma Gonzalez

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Here at People CHICA we celebrate our Latinidad 365 days a year, but during Latinx Heritage Month, we go extra hard. Established in 1988, Latinx Heritage Month recognizes the generations of Latinx Americans who have positively influenced and enhanced our society. All month long, we'll be celebrating with a series called #LatinXcellence, highlighting women who are making a difference in Latinx culture today through their art, work and activism.

On February 14, 2018, Nikolas Cruz opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people and injuring 17 more. Several of the school's students became outspoken advocates for gun control following the attack, including Emma González, who was a senior at the time of the shooting. “We are going to be the kids you read about in textbooks,” she said in a stirring speech given at a rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida just days after the massacre. The speech went viral, and within days she'd amassed nearly a million Twitter followers.

Born and raised in Parkland, Florida, the Cuban American didn't necessarily plan to become an activist so soon, but was inspired to action after seeing her classmates gunned down. “I was active in terms of class discussions, and I was president of the school's [Gay-Straight Alliance],” she told Variety last year. “But I didn't want to be another voice lost in the crowd and have people listen to me at that point in my life. I was still just trying to become the person that I was trying to be, which [is to say] I was waiting for college. I was still formulating myself as a person.”

Now she's one of the most recognizable activists in the US She and her Stoneman Douglas classmates (González graduated last spring) have spent the last year and a half registering voters, leading rallies, and calling on politicians to actually do something about the unrelenting tide of gun violence in this country. Last year, they were instrumental in organizing the March for Our Lives, which had a turnout of an estimated 1.2 million people across the US “Young people in this country have experienced gun violence for their entire lives, only to be faced with a number of representatives and officials who have been seduced by the gun lobby or have generally failed to make effective change,”González wrote in Teen Vogue ahead of the march. After all of this pain and all of this death caused by gun violence,it seems as if the kids are the only ones who still have the energy to make change.”

González has been attacked many times by people many years her senior, for everything from her activism to her sexual orientation and her haircut, but she refuses to give up on her mission to end gun violence in the United States, or give up hoping that people in power will make a change. “I've met so many people who are ready to engage in our political system, and these are exactly the people we need to engage,” she's said. “People who are devoted to the concept of keeping people safe, focusing on the rights of people who need to be kept in mind, who need to be kept alive. People who are looking out for each other, not just themselves. People who are sacrificing a lot because they feel like it's their job.”

It's admittedly tough to feel hopeful when mass shootings continue on a regular basis, but a quick glance at González's Twitter feed shows that some change is happening. Walmart recently announced that it would stop selling handgun ammunition and ask customers to stop openly carrying guns, even in states that allow open carry. Just this week, Colt announced that it would stop manufacturing the AR-15 rifle for consumer purchase. There's a long way to go, but González will be there leading the way. This summer, she led protests against Walmart following the El Paso shooting, and next month, March for Our Lives will host a gun-policy forum in Las Vegas on the anniversary of the Harvest music festival shooting.

“Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA, telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this, we call BS,” González said in her 2018 speech, which still resonates today. “They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence, we call it BS They say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred, we call it BS That us kids don't know what we 're talking about, that we're too young to understand how the government works - we call it BS”