I’m only an amateur historian. But I am an expert on my own life and career. So to bring it around to more contemporary slights: Hispanics are the most underrepresented ethnic group in film and television. “Saturday Night Live” has only just hired its first Latina comic. Are we really to believe there are so few funny Latinos? We are similarly marginalized in business and corporate life.

This exclusion sends a painful message to every Latino child about how he is seen and judged. Latino people face a double challenge: to create our own positive self-image while battling against the way the broader society portrays us. Without textbooks in schools that do justice to our contributions to the making of America, and without media representation expanding to include more Latin faces and voices, we are vulnerable to a demagogue like Mr. Trump claiming that we are all “drug dealers,” “rapists” and “criminals.”

But a range of studies find no link between violent crime and immigration. The fact is that immigrants as a group commit far fewer crimes than the rest of the American population. Almost every immigrant is just here to make a better life for himself.

That can be hard to do when the states where many immigrants live — Texas and Arizona in particular — gerrymander Latino communities out of political power and limit funding to their neighborhoods. Latinos aren’t uniformly liberal; some are conservative because of their religious beliefs or fiscal views. And yet if all of the eligible Latinos voted, a number of states would turn from red to blue.

We need a Latino Spring in this country. We need to demand power and equal opportunity. A friend of mine recently did a small experiment to tease out anti-Latin sentiment. She sent out two résumés for an acting job with her picture attached. She happens to be very dark skinned (“morena,” as we say in Spanish). On one résumé she used her own traditionally Latina-sounding name, while on the other she used a traditionally white-sounding name. The Latina name received zero callbacks while the white name received a few responses.

Where else is this racial profiling going on while we are “living while Latin”? It is going on while we are working for the promotion that doesn’t come, while we are trying to rent an Airbnb for vacation but no one will respond, while we are hoping to make our children’s lives better than our own.

Latinos need to demand our place in American history, and in corporate, political and social fields. We must demand an equal share of the American dream, and not accept a downgraded version of it. We need to stop accepting exclusion over persecution. In this critical election, and in the future, I urge you all to register and vote, to be counted and heard.