El Estado no me Ama: A reflection over being Hispanic in Debate.

Cruz Castillo | 9 min read

This article was largely written free-form with edits afterwards, due to its spirit of being a reflection. This article isn’t meant to be totalizing of every Hispanic person, but how I feel regarding my own identity and debate. 

Public Forum prides itself on the “policy-making skills” we often hear heralded as the core reason to do the event. “Our skills spill upwards because debaters will grow up to be policymakers” as either a reason to do the AFF or as a reason as to why topical debate is good. But those claims really are loaded. What do we mean we’ll “grow up to be policymakers”? What about those of us that the state hates? Debate teaches us to step into the shoes of people in Congress (the real one, not the event) and simulate what goes on, but for almost all students, those skills are kind of useless. When people who look like me aren’t allowed to go to court because ICE officers sit outside ready to deport them, what good is pretending I’m at the top? Even if I learn the intricacies of the system, that doesn’t erase the barriers sown throughout it. 

In September and October, the PF topic was whether or not the US should increase its surveillance along the Southern border. Prior to the topic being chosen, those that were there might remember a debate within the community whether the surveillance topic was racist/ethical to even be debating, but eventually got chosen regardless because it was “educationally valuable” to be talking about in the current political climate. Debate has a reputation (especially from those outside of debate) of being the most “woke” activity, but I saw that it wasn’t the safe place I thought it was. Over and over, during camp and throughout those two months, I repeatedly heard jokes at the expense of migrants, a massive misunderstanding of why people cross, and people saying things that are obviously messed up. It was mentally draining to have to engage in both debating and generally being around the community that time. It only felt worse because of the classic debate-way of what arguments are good or bad, where arguments that actually have a lot of evidence on both sides, ie. the arguments that were supposed to be the “core of the topic” that was supposed to be the “educational” part of it, were often just not read because A- they dealt with the systemic racism that occurs every day at the border instead of something being an existential threat, and B- it’s harder to debate when there’s a lot of evidence that can be read to an argument. Because of competition, the topic’s intended purpose of sending students into controversy only drove them away from it, often leaving arguments about migrants being “funneled” or the detention centers at the border for lay debates, which were often a coin-flip because of a lay judge’s subconscious (or conscious) biases.

In retrospect, I think our tendency to detach ourselves from our arguments played a big role in allowing students to comfortably debate that yes, there should be more deportations, have more crackdowns, etc. so long as it fit into debate’s classic form of utilitarianism. Obviously, there were teams that fought back against that, with “Structural Violence” framing being more common than normal on that topic, but even then, it was a sanitized version of it, designed to fit into debate’s technical way of evaluation, often resulting in spamming arguments rather than go in-depth on any of them, and read these tricky kinds of arguments like “the AFF starts at .001% because links decrease after each sequential step” that when conceded kind of automatically led to the NEG winning, which spills back towards debate being overcoded with competition. 

I don’t mean to say that debate cannot handle these discussions about complex issues, but just that debaters almost need to be forced to, and need to be challenged on what they’ve said rather than the technical merit of an argument. Debate obviously doesn’t reward refusal to engage, so the only real thing one can do is attempt to spin the limited minutes of a debate round toward something else. The bigger problem with the solution of the reading framework and a K regarding the representations of a team/a research model/etc. is that AFF teams prefer to stake the round on a model of debate that excludes those conversations, rather than justify being affirmative, which is what K framework often demands, which is another example of competition overcoding everything, especially with judges being subconsciously preferential to the type of debate they likely coach/did in high school (even more in PF rather than other activities, as Ks are more of a recent thing within the activity, with the judges that voted on those arguments often coming from LD or policy). 

That’s the thing about K debate though, is that it isn’t an endpoint or a solution, it’s a response to the kind of debate that gets repeated over and over. From a model of debate being so insular as to only include articles from a linear, often privileged mode of thinking that comes from most of the people debating the topic in real life, due to their privilege to even be able to get what they’ve written on top of things like search results and widely accessible websites. 

Over the weekend from June 6-8, I competed at a practice tournament with the end goal of winning the tabletote that was the prize for winning the tournament. While I didn’t win the tournament (but am still receiving a tabletote, thank you Cameron), bigger things were happening in the world at that moment. Specifically, while I was competing, LA erupted in protests regarding ICE’s increasing raids throughout the city, resulting in the deployment of 2000 members of the national guard (as I’m editing this, 2000 more have been ordered to be deployed. Ugh.) News regarding what was occurring kept on showing up throughout the tournament, and I would check during the short breaks in between rounds. My mind kept on sticking to it, and having to go back to debate the topic where we debate whether or not the US should invest in nuclear energy, when I most cared about the people that were being deported and dying now. I hated simulation that occurs in rounds, and with most of my family working during the entire day, I didn’t have anybody to really talk to. I was constantly reminded that the state doesn’t love people who look like me, yet my rounds involved me having to advocate for the state. I felt gross, and almost self-betrayed by the words coming out of my mouth sometimes. I had already reflected on arguments like the Politics DA after TOC, and after reading further into what further is included in the bill, it felt shitty forgoing all those other things because not passing it would result in no new programs in the military for the fiscal year. But I still went for the argument round 5 because it was a larp (calling LARP rounds “substance” irks me because it implies that everything else possibly introduced into a round isn’t

“substantive” and fruitful to be discussed) round, and I believed it gave me the best chance of winning in an important round for seeding. 

And doing things in debate that I don’t really agree with is a hard thing to live with. Because the thing is, the state doesn’t love me. Neither does debate. We’re forced to argue for (usually) the US government, the topics are written without large groups in mind, and norms are designed for efficiency of a smooth technical system, not the people sitting in school-chairs inside the room. That’s really what K debate answers to me. A refusal for what I want to disappear. At TOC I got walked in doubles. Same with TFA. At the practice tournament, I dropped in semis. But at TOC, I read an argument surrounding the effects of “green” extraction on migrant communities, and how climate change securitizes migrants as a threat (an easy example being the way most impact cards citing mass migration as a reason for climate change being existential) and I felt most proud of that. Not of my performance, but of my self-expression, in an activity not meant for me.