When no one cares you’re a senator

Let’s talk about status.

U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA) was recently tackled and cuffed at a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) press conference taking place in Los Angeles, California, his legislative backyard.

You’ve seen the footage. He identified himself. 

 “U.S. Senator,” he said. 

And they responded like: “Cool story, bro. Face down.”

Meanwhile, in Montebello, Hawthorne and Pico Rivera, American citizens are being swept up in immigration enforcement raids. 

They protest: “I was born here!” They show papers, but still, they’re handcuffed, then van-stuffed.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a senator or a citizen, if you look like you don’t belong, your status can be discarded in an instant.

That’s the thing about status, it feels like armor — it’s not. 

It’s more like a party wristband; flashy, flimsy and dependent on someone else letting you in. And once they decide you don’t belong, you’re out — leather jeggings be damned. 

I learned this the hard way. No, the jeggings weren’t mine. 

Several years back, I got a seatbelt ticket around the corner from my grandmother’s house in unincorporated Bassett in the San Gabriel Valley. No big deal. I meant to pay it, but life got messy. I missed my court date, which turned into a Failure to Appear, then a Bench Warrant and finally three nights in Los Angeles County’s Men's Central Jail.

“Can someone call my mommy?”

Look, when you’re in a cold, fluorescent processing tank with 40 other dudes and no clothes, you start reaching for comfort.

I reached for status.

I told myself, “This is a mistake. I’m a celebrated high school teacher, a cherished Sunday school leader, a seminary graduate. I’ve written for television, for crying out loud!” (Ok, it was deep cable and nobody watched, but still.)

Having once written food reviews for the Occidental College student paper, I had the temerity to identify my occupation as a journalist, as if to suggest a hard-hitting exposé would follow if my dignity was trampled.

I figured any second, some rational Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy was going to come around with a clipboard and say, “Excuse me, Sir Aguilar, this is clearly beneath you.”

Nope.

Because in that cell, I wasn’t a teacher or a writer or any damn thing. I was just one more Aguilar on a list. Another ego stripped bare.  

That kind of humiliation that incarceration deals you doesn’t leave, but maybe it teaches you something.

We spend our lives chasing status — degrees, titles, follower counts, Teslas, whatever — thinking it’ll insulate us. But it can’t stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from mistaking you. It can’t stop a court from minimizing you. It can’t stop a system never built with you in mind.

The cruelest irony? The higher you climb, the more humiliating the fall. Padilla rightfully thought his senatorial credentials and Massachusetts Institute of Technology pedigree would offer him protection. Instead, he was treated like a nuisance. 

I thought my resume would at least get me into a “low-risk” holding tank. Instead, I got gang-regulated toilet bowls.

But here’s the twist: humiliation can birth humility, and humility can be clarifying. You stop thinking you’re above the people around you and start realizing you're one of them.

Humility is a virtue, a noble aim — an end in and of itself.  But each path toward humility must travel the dusty, bumpy and trash-riddled road of humiliation. At the risk of sounding unnecessarily repetitive: if you want to be humble, you have to be humbled.

There’s no way around it.  

But there is solidarity in a cell, and on the receiving end of a slur and beneath the knee of an overweight cop — wherever people are doing unto you what you had never considered doing unto them.

So what’s the lesson?

Instead of investing in the thin veneer of status, we must invest in people and their potential. Maybe, we stop measuring worth by credentials and start recognizing that our dignity is grounded in a shared humanity.  

Maybe we take up that age-old edict to only do unto others what we’d have them do unto us.

Status will fail you. But humility? That’ll remind you who your people are.

And that’s the beginning of real power.

Carlos Aguilar is the editorial director at Quantasy and Associates, a full-service ad agency in downtown Los Angeles. Aguilar teaches at Occidental College and lives in Covina, California.