Mónica Guzmán

After the election in 2016, I found a foolproof way to stop conversation.

I would tell groups of my fellow Seattle liberals that my parents, who I love to death and see every weekend, are not just Mexican immigrants like me.

They're Mexican immigrants who voted for Donald Trump.

I would share this at networking events, random get-togethers.

Whenever politics came up and people started giving voice to that sense that anyone who voted for someone they think is a monster must be monsters themselves.

I did this so often, it became a kind of game.

Not to make anyone uncomfortable, I realized, but to put my circle to the test.

I've had umpteen conversations with my parents about politics.

I know their reasons, and they know mine.

So after the beats of silence at these get-togethers, as people considered what they knew about the man in the White House, the rhetoric against Mexicans, and this crazy thing I just said about two Mexicans I know who voted for him, I'd wait.

I'd wait to see if instead of changing the subject or walking away,

if someone would turn to me and ask, why?

I'm Monica Guzman.

I'm the author of I Never Thought of It That Way, How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, and the Senior Fellow for Public Practice at Braver Angels, the nation's largest cross-partisan grassroots organization dedicated to depolarizing America.

The one that always comes to mind is my parents.

I'm part of a politically divided family and my parents and I are Mexican immigrants.

They voted for Trump both times, fairly enthusiastically, and I voted for Clinton and Biden.

Even before that, we've just had a lifetime of dinner table conversations that have thrown out, you know, Glenn Beck quotes and all kinds of debates about whatever was going on.

even back in the Clinton days, all kinds of yelling and trying to understand each other.

The kind of conversation that really tipped it for me was when I was in Seattle in 2015, 2016, and 2017, as those conversations about politics got more and more tense in a very blue city.