When I was a little girl, the National Horse Show was held every year in Madison Square Garden. My grandfather, Victor Byron Hugo-Vidal, was a lifelong equestrian — a judge, a jumper, a trainer – and, with his deep, booming voice, the announcer for the National Horse Show for many years. So he took me along to the event at Madison Square Garden. I got to go backstage and meet horses like other girls might have met celebrities. Heaven for an 8-year-old girl obsessed with ponies.

You’ll notice I’m named after my grandfather. (We called him our Zha-Zha.) My grandfather was named for his father, Victor Joseph Marie Hugo-Vidal. What we were always told about my great-grandfather was that he was of Spanish descent, and had to flee the Philippines during the Philippine Revolution in 1896, because his father, Simplicio, had been a Spanish-appointed governor. My grandfather and the rest of us were told that the rest of his family had died. My great-grandfather came to America sometime in the 1920s as a displaced Spaniard. He became quite successful in America – went to UCLA, became a banker and Broadway producer, and even belonged to the same country club as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

A few years ago, my sister was doing genealogical research at the same time a scholar in the Philippines named Erwin Bonifacio was writing a paper on my great-great-grandfather, Simplicio Jugo Vidal. They connected. We found out that Simplicio was not appointed by the Spanish. He was, in fact, a Filipino nationalist who published a newspaper called La Vanguardia Filipina as part of the struggle toward freedom from Spanish colonialism. After the revolution, he was appointed governor of Capiz province by the American occupation in the Philippines.

Simplicio was also mixed-race. His father was a Chinese merchant and his mother was native Filipino and Spanish. This made my great-grandfather mixed-race as well. In the America of the 1920s and 1930s, that was a major barrier to success. So the young man born Jose Maria Ysidro Bonifacio Seraller Jugo became Victor Joseph M. Hugo-Vidal. And he passed as white. He never spoke to his very much alive family in the Philippines again. I found out from a distant relative in Manila – we share the same great-grandfather – that Victor’s brother, Raphael, came to the United States after World War II in an attempt to find him. He never did.

At the same time as Victor was hiding his heritage, on the other side of the family on the other side of the country, in upstate New York, my other great-great-grandfather, Garrett MacEachron, joined the domestic terrorist group known as the Ku Klux Klan. We don’t have any records or family stories of him committing any crimes, but that doesn’t mean much. The KKK was pretty popular then, as they were aggressively anti-immigrant (and anti pretty much every other minority you could think of). Their membership peaked in the 1920s as an anti-immigrant backlash swept across our country.

We’re in the middle of a very anti-immigrant moment right now. I thought of my two ancestors, Victor and Garrett, while I watched scenes of Donald Trump’s hateful rally in Madison Square Garden. Americans like Great-Great-Grandpa Garrett tried their hardest to keep Americans like my great-grandfather Jose Maria Ysidro out of the country. Americans like Garrett, and like the ones laughing at racist jokes and screaming “America is for Americans and Americans only,” are the reason my great-grandfather hid his heritage. My Zha-Zha never knew he was Filipino, never knew he had cousins alive and well in that country.

And here I am today, with the blood of both men in my veins and an anglicized last name. From Jugo Vidal to Hugo-Vidal. Watching the Madison Square Garden of my childhood be used as a staging ground for a racist rally, I think the horses were a better use of the space.

I’m voting for Kamala Harris this Tuesday. I hope you will too. If Kamala Harris becomes president, my life and the life of my family will get easier. If Donald Trump wins the presidency, my life and that of my family will become harder.

But regardless of who wins on Tuesday, America will still be split between the Victors and the Garretts, just like we were in 1924. There will still be an enormous bloc of our population who have a narrow, angry, exclusive and white view of what the United States of America should be. Those people are the ones whose attitude caused Jose Maria Ysidro to change his name and origin story; people who think that our country should only be for people who can assimilate into whiteness.

After all, if America is for Americans only – who gets to become American? Who decides? Those folks who see immigration as a problem, rather than an opportunity, and who see immigrants as objects to be feared, rather than actual human people trying to make a good life for themselves (like the rest of us). I am, as the youth say, not about that life. I may be on Great-Great-Grandpa Garrett’s side of the family, but I’m not on his side of the fight.

“I believe that it is not useless to spend the time writing for periodicals while waiting for the time to do something else.” My great-great-grandfather Simplicio wrote that in a letter dated April 27, 1889. When I began writing this column in 2017, I had no idea that I had an ancestor who also felt he could use newspapers to raise awareness of social issues. And to think I could have lost that connection to my family history forever if not for a chance digital encounter between my sister and Mr. Bonifacio, halfway around the world.

I don’t blame Victor Joseph for what he did. I blame the culture surrounding him when he arrived in this country that made it so he could not be both Filipino-American and financially successful. But we can change culture. Simplicio Jugo Vidal believed in the power of the written word to move hearts and minds, and to affect change. So do I. If we are to become a more welcoming, less angry and divided country, we are going to have to fight it out one heart and one mind at a time.