The Gilroy and El Paso massacres: Trump and the long history of anti-Mexican racism in the United States
It’s sad to say that I was shocked and angered but not surprised when I heard of the July 28, 2019 mass shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, which was carried out by a white supremacist. I felt more shock, anger, and apprehension a few days later when I heard of yet another mass shooting carried out by another white supremacist, this time in El Paso, Tejas. Again, I wasn’t surprised that something like this could happen in the U.S. today.
Trump started his campaign for president about three years ago by calling Mexicans “rapists” and “criminals.” He has called us “enemies” of the U.S. and promised to build a wall to keep us out of this country. Once in office, he has called Central Americans “animals,” and their nations “shithole countries.” Political pundits like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have followed suit by claiming that immigration from poor countries makes the U.S. “dirty” and are “destroying America.” They have called Mexico a “hostile foreign power,’ implying that Mexicans in the U.S. are subversive agents. They have said that immigration is a threat to the U.S., which will lead to a less safe country and that it will result in the death of “America.”
Currently, tens of thousands of immigrants are being held in horrible inhumane conditions in detention camps across the U.S. According to sources from 2018, most of the people in these camps are from Mexico and Central America. They are made to suffer in overcrowded spaces with no room to sit and lay down, spaces that are contaminated with urine and feces, and are subjected to extreme cold temperatures. They have been denied access to showers, medical care, proper sanitation, potable drinking water, and warm meals, instead being served spoiled food. They have been told to drink water from toilets and have suffered from sexual, mental, and physical abuse at the hands of the Border Patrol agents who work in these camps.
These people have also had to endure being forcibly separated from their children and parents. Thousands have had to suffer this trauma in the past three years. The people here are being forced to live in inhumane conditions because those leading the government and in the ruling class of this country don’t see them as fully human,
A lot of racists in the U.S. have been emboldened by these remarks and actions. For the past few years, one sees ever increasing racist verbal and physical attacks against immigrants, Mexicans, and Central Americans. Seeing recorded cell-phone videos of Latinos being told to “go back to your country” or that “this is America, speak English” is becoming more common.
I knew that things were going to get pretty bad when I saw video footage in July of Trump supporters chanting “send her back!” when Donald Trump mentioned congresswoman Ilhan Omar at a rally in North Carolina. I knew that this chant was not just aimed at her, but at all the black and brown people in this country.
A lot of people are saying that Trump has emboldened these racists with his remarks and actions. They are right. But Trump did not create any new sentiments, he merely made it more acceptable for people to be more openly racist and to attack immigrants, Mexicans, and Central Americans.
The murderer in the Gilroy Garlic Festival complained about “hordes of mestizos” entering into public spaces while the murderer of the El Paso shooting expressed fear of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Later he confessed to police that he was directly targeting Mexicans. At the heart of both shooters' comments are a fear of the growth of the Mexican population in the U.S., driving further paranoia that whites will become a minority who will live under their dominance.
Racist notions of Mexicans as biologically inferior subhumans were here before Trump. They’ve been a cornerstone of Anglo-American culture and since the era of Anglo expansion into Tejas. These views cannot be purged from this society because they are an integral part of it, they have and continue to prop it up. These views are part of the fabric of the current class-divided Anglo-American society and will continue to exist so long as this society exists.
This fuels the view that we don’t belong here–that Mexicans are foreigners. These are not new, but rather historically recycled views. Racist notions of Mexicans as biologically inferior subhumans were here before Trump. They’ve been a cornerstone of Anglo-American culture and since the era of Anglo expansion into Tejas. These views cannot be purged from this society because they are an integral part of it, they have and continue to prop it up. These views are part of the fabric of the current class-divided Anglo-American society and will continue to exist so long as this society exists.
A nation built on white supremacy
If we are to understand the racist anti-Mexican views inherent in Anglo-American society we must first look at the history of this society from its very inception. This society was built on the displacement and genocide of American Indians. It was built on the oppression and forced labor of enslaved blacks. Racist anti-Indigenous ideas were used to justify the extermination of these people by English colonists. Portrayals of American Indians as subhuman and barbarians were also meant to encourage Anglo-American settlers to kill them. It is always easier to get people to kill other people if you can convince them that their victims are not actually people.
Moreover, their achievements and development of this land (the settled villages surrounded by fields of corn, the taming of the forests, control of wildlife population, etc.) has and continues to be erased to paint them as incapable of developing this continent. This erasure has also served to justify the Anglo-American theft of Indian lands, supporting the false narrative that it was they who made the land productive and not the Indians. But what is implicit in this disappearance is the belief that American Indians could not have the mental capacity to change their environment.[1]
Anti-black racism was fostered by the ruling class in order to justify the enslavement of Africans. Africans had to be made to appear as subhuman in order to paint the whole system of black chattel slavery as one that was not inhumane and cruel, but natural. In this system, blacks were treated as no more than beasts of burden. In order for this to happen, they had to be socially constructed as “racially inferior”, not as human.
Despite the ruling class's intentions, poor whites have not always viewed the world as their masters wished. In colonial America, there is evidence that blacks and whites often treated each other as equals, “unconcerned about visible differences,” and worked together and socially fraternized. At the same time, there were numerous cases of blacks and whites, slaves, indentured servants and poor people resisting and rebelling together.
Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, which was sparked by attacks against the Doeg people in the area, was an example of a rebellion in which whites and blacks joined together against the colonial ruling elite.[2] At this time, a very small ruling class existed in the English colonies and ruled over a vastly larger population of poor whites and blacks, most of them indentured servants, who saw commonality with one another and tended to unite in episodic rebellions. The ruling class was, with good reason, afraid of being overthrown by a united black and white revolution.
The colonial ruling elite relied on anti-black racism to keep poor whites and blacks divided, a tool that the capitalist class still relies on today. Laws of segregation, such as those passed in 1691 by the Virginia General Assembly, were also specifically designed to keep whites from inter-marrying with blacks and Indians. In practice, the implementation of laws of segregation were designed to prevent white servants from engaging in acts of resistance with blacks.[3]
Racist views of American Indians and blacks as subhuman have materially benefited the ruling class. Their conquest, genocide, and forced removal of American Indians from their lands were facilitated by such views. These ideas also helped to prop up a system of chattel slavery that contributed immensely to their fortunes built throughout this period. This racism has kept poor and oppressed workers divided along racial lines, allowing the Anglo-American ruling class to maintain its control over a large population that they need, but also fear.
Anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic and expansionist
In order to better understand Anglo-American views of Mexicans, we must also look at Anglo-American views of the Spanish. The Spaniard was viewed as a “second-rate” European capable of great cruelty. [4] Spaniards were also seen as heartless, genocidal, and, worse of all in the eyes of Anglo-Americans, part Moor and African. [5] Anti-Catholicism inherited from English Protestantism, was also another strike against the Spanish in the eyes of the Anglos. .
The desire of the Anglo-American ruling class to expand the borders into Mexican territory is another factor that had a foundational impact in how the population of the early US came to view Mexicans. The desire of Anglo elites to expand west and acquire Mexico's northern territory was rooted in the earliest visions of US independence. Thomas Jefferson once wrote
…it is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by the same laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.[6]
US Military Captain Lemuel Ford, a participant in the wars of westward expansion, is quoted as saying in 1835 that Mexicans must “recede” before the march of Anglo-saxons across North America.
These quotes by Jefferson and Ford reveal the fear of miscegenation between Anglos and the people of Latin America, and the belief that Europeans and the people that inhabited these yet unconquered regions were not to live together, share the same land, or interact in the same social space. Anglo encroachment into new territory would mean that they would displace whoever was already living there.
This belief in Westward expansion was not just held by southerners who wanted to expand slavery. Many northerners also held this view. Northern writer Walt Whitman was an ardent supporter or westward expansion and the war against Mexico. Even northern abolitionists such as James Russel Lowell believed in this idea of “manifest destiny”, writing in 1859 that it was the
manifest destiny of the English race to occupy this whole continent and to display there that the practical understanding in matters of government and colonization which no other race has given such proof of possessing since the Romans.”[7]
A look at northern newspapers of the 1840’s reveals a lot of support for the acquisition of new territory during the Mexican-American war. Mario Barrera shows in Race and Class in the Southwest that New York and New England-based newspapers were the first to advocate for the annexation of California during this war.[8] The idea of “manifest destiny” was in reality a justification for the expansion west that was needed to fulfill the economic interests of southern slave owners and northern merchants and capitalists.
When Anglos first encountered Mexicans, they looked upon them as an “inferior” people that shared the same racial traits as American Indians, blacks, and racialized “Moorish” Spaniards who were also Catholic. They were imbued with a sense of racial and cultural superiority, and as a consequence felt entitled to take their lands and natural resources. The Mexicans, on the other hand, were encountering a nation whose ruling class had built their state and wealth on the genocide and enslavement of blacks and American Indians. A ruling class that although divided among themselves, were united in their desire to expand west to expand their riches. These factors contributed to how early Anglos perceived Mexicans, which continues to poison the minds of racists in the 21st century.
Notes:
[1] An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, 1491 by Charles C. Mann, and American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World by David Stannard all give very good accounts of the history of the Indigenous people of the East Coast of what is now the U.S. before and after the arrival of Europeans.
[2] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1980,1995.1998,1990,2003), 31-32, 39-42.
[3]Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 31.
Americo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958, 1986), 17.
[5] Arnoldo De Leon, They called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes towards Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983, 2008), 4.
[6] Leo Cervantes, More than a Century of the Chicano Movement (Phoenix: Editorial Orbis Press, 2004), 13.
[7] Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 131.
[8] Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1979), 13-14.
Blas Reies grew up in rural California raised by Mexican parents who were agricultural workers. He continues to work and organize in his community, is committed to social change and collaborating with others who want to fight for the liberation of all the oppressed.
