Always a victim.
Magdalena Al Omari, a Mexican-American convert to Islam, slipped on the hijab and braced for whatever may come.
It happened a few months later, in the checkout line of a grocery store in Santa Ana.
“No tiene calor en esa cosa?” one woman asked another. Isn’t she hot in that thing?
Al Omari shot back, in perfect Spanish, that yes, it was quite a hot day in general. Aren’t you hot, she asked.
The women’s eyes widened with surprise.
The Garden Grove resident had prepared herself for the suspicious looks and glares that would accompany her hijab — a powerful, conspicuous symbol of the Muslim faith. But Al Omari was surprised by another, unexpected consequence of wearing the headscarf: It had essentially erased her Mexican American identity for other Latinos.
“As time went on, people were not seeing me as being Latina,” the Tijuana-born Al Omari said. “They were seeing me as Arab.”
As a Latina Muslim, she’s among the fastest-growing ethnic group in Islam and at the intersection of three demographics spurned during President Trump’s nascent administration: women, Muslims and Mexicans.
“It’s a heavy dance. You are never really in one place. It’s like you never feel at home in either place,” said Eren Cervantes-Altamirano, a Toronto-based blogger and writer who has researched and studied the intersection of being Latin American, indigenous and Muslim in the U.S. and Canada. “You have to play it day by day.”
Though the exact number of Latino Muslims in the U.S. is difficult to gauge, some experts estimate there are 200,000 and about 90 percent of them are converts, according to a report authored by Stephanie Londono, a Florida International University professor and researcher who has studied the trend of Latinas converting to Islam.
Most Islamic converts are women, Londono said.