The Wetback in the $1,000 Suit

A message to our readers

By Nick Valencia | August 14, 2025

ATLANTA— For nearly two decades in The South, I have learned how to carry a kind of armor. Armor stitched in Italian wool. No matter how subtle the slights, no matter how polite people were when they reminded me I didn’t belong, there was always the ability to retreat to the comfort of a status and title: CNN Correspondent.

There have been times, even with all of my outward success I’ve felt like it wasn’t enough.

“They might treat me like a wetback, but I was a wetback in a $1,000 suit,” I would tell myself, absurd and infuriating as it was.

It gave me something to hold on to. They used to see the suit first. Now they see me.

Those $1,000 suits—once my daily armor—hang in the closet, waiting for selective moments. I wore them in for years in The South, using the suit as a shield against the kind of treatment that still lingers here. But the suit isn’t my armor anymore. I’ve traded it for the work clothes of someone who belongs in the field, not behind a desk.

And yet, in its absence, I feel the air more sharply. In these times of an attempt at massive deportations, families separated, kids too scared to go to school, sick people not getting care—I’m navigating this place as an independent journalist, a Latino without the imprimatur of a global news brand, without the suit.

After watching a video I’d posted about this topic, my mother called. She reminded me of something she’s said my whole life: Don’t you ever let anyone make you feel lesser than.

Sitting here writing under a canopy of 100-year-old oak trees in our Atlanta backyard, I think about my place here—not just in the South, but in the history of my community. I think about being a third-generation American. A Chicano born in LA, farmed out to The South on a hope and a prayer, building bridges and tearing down walls—even when it feels like no one notices.

A friend once told me: pioneers always feel alone in the field. My father knew that truth.

In 1990, as part of a beautification project, he helped plant trees along our block in Northeast LA that my children now play under. They never met him. He died when I was 17, at just 51 years old. But years later, it’s his grandchildren that still live in the shade of his work.

That’s what I think about when I think about the work I’m doing now—whether or not I ever get to see the payoff, I know it’s there.

So we march forward. Not because I’m impervious to the stares or the whispered doubts, but because like Mama Valencia said, I refuse to give anyone real estate in my head to make me believe I’m less.

“Look at all you’ve accomplished, Look at what you did on your own. Look at where you come from,” she told me on the phone.

My mom was reminding me of the arc I too easily overlook—I have already broken through walls that weren’t ever designed to let me pass.