What’s in the news in the past
few days? The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre is going off his rocker again, with Donald
Trump securely in tow. What exactly does that confusingly-worded Second
Amendment say anyways? That the people have the right to bear arms—but in a “well
regulated militia”? Trump is also pushing “mini-medical” plans; don’t be a fool
and get one, because you’ll end up paying more in premiums that you will ever
receive in benefits. Locally, a white man was arrested after making a brazen
attempt to sexually assault a “bikini barista” in Kent, climbing through the
checkout window of her coffee stand and dragging her out into an alley, before
he was “distracted” by the arrival of another “customer.” Trump followed-up by
“threatening” to remove ICE and border patrol personnel from California as
“punishment” for the state’s lack of cooperation with his deportation efforts,
predicting that the state would soon be flooded with violence and crime, in
keeping with his racist notion that Hispanic immigrants are all murderers and
rapists.
But not all, it seems. An Albuquerque, New Mexico television news station
is reporting that there are hundreds of children
locally, who are U.S. citizens but were forced to leave the contrary after one
or more of their parents were deported, are crossing over the border to attend
public schools in the U.S., which is their right; some are as young as
Kindergarten age. One of them, Porter Howard, whose father is a U.S. citizen,
is set to graduate high school with honors despite the difficulties in getting to
and from school; he notes that he encounters some white students at the school who
mime the resentment of their parents toward U.S. citizens like him even being
allowed to attend public school in the country of their birth.
CNBC is pointing out the
hypocrisy of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, noting that
more—not less—immigrant workers of all types and “merits” are needed to keep
the economy growing. It observes that Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers
chair Kevin Hassett is now trumpeting Trump’s fascist “America First” vision,
yet when Barack Obama was president, Hassett wrote "With lackluster GDP
growth threatening to become our new normal, allowing more immigrants to enter
for the sake of employment is one of the few policies that might restore our
old normal," That 2013 article carried the headline ‘America Needs
Workers.’ It concluded with Hassett's assessment of how to increase U.S.
economic growth by a half-percentage point per year: giving more priority to
new workers while admitting twice as many immigrants.”
A story from Reuters tells us
that a lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston is charging the Trump
administration and the DHS with acting with blatant racial animus in regard to
its recent rulings in regard to certain groups living in the country under the Temporary
Protective Status law. “The lawsuit cited statements it said showed the Republican
president’s ‘dislike and disregard for Latino and Black immigrants,’ most
recently in reported remarks in January by Trump saying immigrants from Africa
and Haiti come from ‘shithole countries.’ The animus directed towards Latino
and Black immigrants is a clear and unfortunate thread running throughout
President Trump’s statements - and is actualized by his Administration’s
policies, such as the ones challenged by this lawsuit, the complaint said.”
Last year in The Guardian, the cynicism and hypocrisy
of the American mainstream media in refusing to confront the racist roots of
white “populist movements,” rather attempting to “understand” white racists as
just “ordinary people” with “ordinary” problems:
This Thanksgiving, as one half of the US was rummaging through Black
Friday sale bins and the other was ringing them up at registers, the New
York Times
ran a story titled “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland.” The voice in question was Tony Hovater, a
young welder from Huber Heights, Ohio – who also happened to be a member of the
neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party. But the Times story focused instead on
how normal and ordinary Hovater was, what he puts in his pasta and what he and
his fiancee have put on their wedding registry. Nowhere did it mention that
Hovater and his party describe their mission as “fighting for the rights of
white Americans”, tell followers to “hate migrant communities” and believe that “mass purging” of
non-white citizens is a tenable idea.
The article produced a decent bit of outcry, prompting
responses by
the national editor and a
reflection of sorts by the author, who had presented a
neo-Nazi as just another member of America’s beleaguered and victimised white
working class. But the American left should not have been so surprised at the
Times’s decision to run the piece, for 2017 has been the year of complicity,
with all aspects of the white working class – no matter how unforgivable –
being treated with fascinated sympathy in the wake of Donald Trump’s election
win.
The Guardian noted that before and after the
election, “folksy” books were written to “explain” why white people supported
Trump, which tended to ignore the fact that although not all whites were living
the life of “privilege” and “entitlement” they expected for being white, for nonwhites
(blacks and Hispanics in particular) that was their “expected” lot in life. In
a book called Nomadland, about aging
white Americans who travel about the country in RVs looking for work, author
Jessica Bruder chose to profile “a scrappy woman named Linda, whose unerring
positivity is truly endearing.” But Bruder seems to have a blind spot for
nearby Hispanic agricultural workers, because “the white seniors are of
particular note because they, unlike brown or black workers, have lost the good
life instead of never having been able to get to it.”
The Guardian also noted that although most in the U.S.
media and elsewhere are still under the illusion that fascism is a purely
“European” phenomenon,
However, for years
surveys have shown that strong authoritarian, nativist and populist positions
command pluralities, if not majorities, among Republican supporters. Positions
on crime, immigration and Islam have hardened rather than weakened, while
conspiracy theories that were at the fringes of the militia movement in the
1990s are now widespread. What the increasingly forgotten rise of the Tea Party
indicated several years before was simply confirmed by the rise of Trump: the
Republican establishment had radicalised its base to such an extent that it was
no longer representative of its views. Trump didn’t hijack the Republican
party, he provided the base with a real representative again. But just as the
Koch brothers didn’t control the Tea Party, Trump doesn’t control “Trumpism”.
He is merely the current voice of the radicalised base.
Since at least 2004, Hispanics regardless of their legal status
have been the national “whipping boy.” The term’s origination is when a royal
prince needed to be punished, a “stand-in” was selected who received the
punishment instead; it isn’t difficult to see how the analogy applies in this
country. Take for instance who is taking the “punishment” for the U.S.’ lust
for illegal drugs. There was a National
Geographic special report on the horrible massacre in the small town of
Allende, Mexico in 2011, not far from the Texas border. What is striking about
this is not just the savagery of the
massacre, but just how much the incompetence of the American side of the “drug
war” led to the deaths of hundreds of innocent people, with the “aid” of the
U.S.’ virtually unregulated gun trade that allows an endless flow of weaponry
into Mexico. Indifferent Americans might be “surprised” to learn that
Entire blocks of some of the town’s busiest
streets lie in ruins. Once garish mansions are now crumbling shells, with
gaping holes in the walls, charred ceilings, cracked marble countertops and
toppled columns. Strewn among the rubble are tattered, mud-covered remnants of
lives torn apart: shoes, wedding invitations, medications, television sets,
toys. In March 2011 gunmen from the Zetas cartel, one of the most violent drug
trafficking organizations in the world, swept through Allende and nearby towns
like a flash flood, demolishing homes and businesses and kidnapping and killing
dozens, possibly hundreds, of men, women and children.
The destruction and disappearances went on in fits and starts for
weeks. Only a few of the victims’ relatives — mostly those who didn’t live in
Allende or had fled — dared to seek help. “I would like to make clear that
Allende looks like a war zone,” reads one missing person report. “Most people who I questioned about my
relatives responded that I shouldn’t go on looking for them because outsiders
were not wanted, and were disappeared.”
But unlike most places in Mexico that have been ravaged by the drug
war, what happened in Allende didn’t have its origins in Mexico. It began in
the United States, when the Drug Enforcement Administration scored an
unexpected coup. An agent persuaded a high-level Zetas operative to hand over
the trackable cellphone identification numbers for two of the cartel’s most
wanted kingpins, Miguel Ángel Treviño and his brother Omar.
Then the DEA took a gamble. It shared the intelligence with a Mexican
federal police unit that has long had problems with leaks — even though its
members had been trained and vetted by the DEA. Almost immediately, the
Treviños learned they’d been betrayed. The brothers set out to exact vengeance
against the presumed snitches, their families and anyone remotely connected to
them. Their savagery in Allende was particularly surprising because the
Treviños not only did business there — moving tens of millions of dollars in
drugs and guns through the area each month — they’d also made it their home.
The U.S. is neck-deep in this
violence, not just because of the gun trafficking, but because the U.S. is the
largest consumer market for illegal drugs in the world. This may surprise some
people, but it is technically a violation of the Fourth Amendment to ban people
from consuming anything they wish, but this little problem was skirted around
by making the availability of “recreational” drugs subject to the requirement
of obtaining licenses by government, which it does not do. States that
currently have legalized marijuana require growers and sellers to obtain
licenses to do so, otherwise it is still illegal. Prohibition saw the kind of
violence we see in Mexico occurring in the U.S. during the early 1930s, so we
shouldn’t pretend to be “shocked” by what our drug prohibition policy has
visited upon much of Mexico.
For a
group that finds itself under constant assault from so many angles, there are
next to no Hispanics in the American mainstream media who are allowed to
provide an alternative narrative to the one provided for them by people who
have a surprising level of ignorance about Hispanic’s “alien” culture, allowing
them at best only the vaguest connection with this country even if they are
native-born citizens, and all despite the fact the first permanent settlement
in the U.S. was Spanish, and that most people in Mexico have something that the
vast majority of this “nation of immigrants” do not have—the “blood” of the
original inhabitants of this land. It is you
who is the stranger, the interloper. I currently work in a downtown Seattle
office building—you know, “progressive” Seattle? Well, not a day goes by when I
am made to feel that I am the one who
doesn’t “belong.”
So,
if the media isn’t going to allow Hispanics, still technically the largest
“minority” group in the country, to speak for themselves, then one has to look
for “heroes” elsewhere—even “fake” ones. They are, of course, few and far
between. Danny Trejo in the Machete films
provided some kickass against the usual Hollywood stereotypes of maids, thugs
and Latina characters who genuflect before white social domination. Of course,
these films were not widely distributed, and consequently had little impact in
changing the perception that Hispanics have no wherewithal to fight back
against the constant barrage of attacks from all sides. While Robert Rodriguez
has made some B-grade films that cater to a Hispanic political sensibility, Mexican-born
director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has not used his mainstream success in the
U.S. to even bother casting Hispanic actors in his own films. It has been a
long time since a film like El Norte has appeared to force Americans to
confront their own ignorance and bigotry.
With the release of Marvel’s Black Panther film which showcases a
mostly all-black cast, we are once more confronted with the reality that the
Hollywood and the media are quite eager to pander to the black audience, and
its sense of victimhood, and attempts to “remedy” it; it shouldn’t be seen as a
coincidence that the film was released during Black History Month, which
doesn’t have a Hispanic equivalent. The film’s success is not necessarily
because it is “good,” even within a genre that is currently all the rage, but
because Hollywood has for the past thirty-five years worked to establish black
stars in mainstream films (Eddie Murphy represented the beginning of that
effort).
On the other hand, Hollywood has
done virtually nothing in promoting Hispanic actors, especially male actors.
Yes, there are some female actors, but they are generally typecast as love
interests of Anglo whites, or helping to “confirm” racial stereotypes. One of
the more successful “Hispanic” actors of late is Zoe Saldana, who has appeared
in a number of high profile “fantasy” films, but this leads me to another “beef”
with Hollywood, the fact that Saldana is not being cast because she is “Hispanic,”
but because she is “Afro” and Hollywood expects her to appeal more to a black
audience than a Hispanic audience it doesn’t understand.
This is no small matter. Marvel
has no Hispanics in its movie universe, except one or two it killed off (one,
Stilwell, didn’t even have a Spanish name). What is it doing to lend some
“diversity” to this universe? “Miles Morales” is replacing the deceased Peter
Parker as Spider Man in the comic books and in an animated film. He was
“designed” by a Latina. But is he really “Hispanic”? I think the Hispanic
community should be greatly insulted by the fact that “Morales” is
“Afro-Latino.” Yeah, he looks more “black” than he does “Latino.” The vast
majority of Hispanics are not black, so why make him black? How can the vast
majority of Hispanics identify with him as “one of them”?
Why not have just ditched the
“Morales” character and just made him plain black? Some observers in the Marvel
world are wondering if it is possible to select the “right” actor to play a “live action” version of this character. I
have a theory about this. I think that Marvel knows that at present time
Hollywood has not cultivated a credible Hispanic actor to play a “major”
standalone role like this, so it is hedging its bets. Is it more “politically incorrect”
to cast a white actor in what is supposed to be a “Hispanic” role, or a black
actor? Doubtless Marvel believes that it is less so to cast a black actor as “Miles
Morales” and pretend he is “Hispanic.” One must remember that this isn’t just a
matter of “ethnic” diversity, but of sensibility; a Hispanic super hero must be
mindful that his (or her) “friends” and enemies both belong to a universe that
has been largely hostile to them.
All of this points to the fact
that in this country the Hispanic community has been fighting its own lonely and
largely ignored civil rights struggle. In the book Testimonio: A Documentary History of the Mexican-American Struggle for
Civil Rights, a little acknowledged or discussed sordid chapter in American
history is told. While white and black viewpoints dominate the political and
social discussion in this country, the Hispanic battles for respect has been
either treated with indifference or ignored altogether. As a result of this,
the worst and most contemptible paranoid fears and stereotypes have been
allowed to circulate with little or no “allowed” pushback from those who are
the victims of it. Latin America, which has been abused by U.S. policies in the
past (particularly Central America), is little more than an afterthought in the
discussion of U.S. foreign policy, only “acknowledged” today as the point of
origin for “illegal aliens,” murderers and rapists.
This, far from being anything
“new,” has been the norm from the beginning. Testimonio tells us that despite the rights as U.S. citizens
“guaranteed” by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, newly minted citizens of
Mexican descent were able to stave off complete disenfranchisement everywhere
only in New Mexico, whose application for statehood was delayed until lawmakers in Washington felt
it had a safely “Anglo” majority. Hispanic residents throughout the former
Mexican territories were beset by widespread discrimination, discriminatory
laws specifically targeting them, voter suppression tactics that included
onerous poll taxes and grandfather clauses, and being illegally forced off
their land by Anglo “squatters” with the law and the courts usually ignoring
their legal right to their own property.
Worse was the belief by the Anglo
community (especially in Texas) that “Mexican” lives were little more elevated
than rats (the way Jews were portrayed in the Nazi propaganda film, The Eternal Jew—or as implied by the
likes of Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter). The lynchings and vigilante killings of
“Mexicans”—most infamously by the Texas Rangers—numbered in the many thousands.
Mass killing of innocent Hispanics (like the Porvenir Massacre) were “uncommon”
only because most went unreported. “Ridding the country of Mexicans” was a
common refrain all over the country, especially during times of economic
difficultly, usually because of the largely exaggerated belief in “cultural”
differences that were always negative in nature; while the Japanese internment
continues to be seen as a dark patch in American history, the forced expulsion
of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens for the crime being “Mexican” during
the Great Depression is still almost entirely ignored by the history books and
the media.
Despite this insistence by the
Anglo world that they were not “one of them” and thus not “real” Americans,
many Mexican-Americans persist then and now to hide from the fact that the original
European “pure-blood” population is in many places in Latin America is only a
small (but powerful) minority, since the original Spanish explorers did not
bring their women with them, and unlike the English did not suffer sufficiently
from racist notions that prevented them from taking on indigenous women as
“consorts.” This means that the vast majority could count at least some
indigenous ancestry; yet despite the
fact very few can call themselves “pure Caucasian,” many still persist in
identifying themselves as “white” in the
expectation that they would then be treated as “equals,” or at least be treated
no more discriminatorily than Italians or Jews.
Thus in 1940, Mexican-Americans
were officially classified as “white” by the federal government after pressure
from Mexican-American activists who chaffed at being classified as “colored” in
many places. Yet they still served in segregated military units during World
War II (there are no accurate numbers of Hispanics who served in the U.S. Army
because of this “white” classification). But others did not live in a world of
such illusion, and in the 1954 Hernandez vs. Texas decision, the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that Mexican-Americans did comprise a discriminated against
“class,” suffering the effects of de facto nonwhite status in this
country, and this “difference” was later to be acknowledged in U.S. Census
reports.
Contrary to myths perpetrated by
Trump and even progressive populists like Bernie Sanders, Mexican-Americans did
fight for better working conditions and equal rights with white workers. This
included Cesar Chavez, who I had the privilege of hearing speak in Sacramento a
few years before he passed away. Unfortunately, this “story” is “remembered”
from films like Salt of the Earth,
which was initially blacklisted in the 1950s for unknown reasons. This film
allegedly tells in fictionalized form the actual 15-month labor strike against
Empire Zinc, mainly by Mexican miners who fought against lower wages, poorer
housing conditions, lack of hot running water, and more dangerous working
conditions than their white co-workers. They were not only opposed by the
company, but by the judicial system, local law enforcement and even other
unions.
When the striking miners were
levied heavy fines by a court for continuing the strike, the idea surfaced that
since the wives of the miners were not employees of the company, they could not
legally be fined for replacing them on the picket line. Not surprisingly, this
is what finally gained the strike some national attention, especially after
women and children were subsequently being arrested, and after a period of bad
publicity Empire Zinc finally accepted most of the strikers’ demands. But Salt of the Earth turns all this into a
feminist “statement,” or so it was referred to in later years. A
straightforward documentary would have been far more truthful in telling this
story rather than what we see in Salt,
which I dislike because it trivialized and marginalized the racial
discrimination faced by the miners, instead turning the gender political trick
of making the male miners somehow “bad guys.”
Thus
is the difficulty of meaningful push-back against discrimination, paranoia and
scapegoating from virtually every direction. As a federal judge in Brooklyn,
Nicholas Garaufis, stated in an injunction supporting DACA last week, Trump and
Jeff Sessions have shown repeated arbitrary and capricious attitudes toward the
constitutionality of DACA, and of its recipients. The judge “slammed” Trump for
his “recurring redundant drumbeat of anti-Latino commentary. This isn’t ordinary.
In this country, in over 250 years, it’s extreme, it’s recurrent and it’s
vicious.” Having already called Sessions “heartless,” Garaufis accused him of
seeming “to think that courts don’t get to have their own opinions.” For the
time being, it seems, Hispanics have to rely on others to speak for them. The
only way this will change is if the media decides that most Hispanics in this
country are “real” Americans, too.
