Suddenly Not Invisible: Miami Debate Picture of the Night

Credit Glamour for a post and a GIF on this woman from the CNN-Univision debate last night. If you happened to be watching, she’s the undocumented worker who asked Clinton and Sanders (through an interpreter) about deportation. Her name is Lucia Quiej and she had her five children with her. Her husband couldn’t make it though, as he was deported six years ago.

Also credit the tweet author, Ms. Carmon, an MSNBC reporter with 37k followers — who, for the record, is an Israeli-American. It looks like she re-tweeted the pic from Univision Política. I’m purely guessing here, but maybe her foreign-born status (and some sensitivity to the Palestinian crisis?) would, amongst her colleagues, bestow this heightened appreciation of “the other.”

But the main point is the rarity of the view. If you were digging deep to locate it, you might have found this shot on the AP site of Lucia on the TV screen in unimaginable parity with Clinton. Otherwise, I’m not seeing much more of this “inescapable” image in the visual news stream. If Ms. Quiej’s moment of fame is stunning, though, it’s not just because of the vicious wedge the GOP candidates are driving with the immigration issue. It’s remarkable for making a whole class of people at beck-and-call to suddenly materialize for an instant.

And as irony, too, there’s Old Glory as the vanishing point.

(updated for clarity, 8:15 am PST. image: CNN screenshot.)