Latinos and the Morality of American Politics
Bernie Sanders, with key endorsements from the likes of Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, is credited by analysts for building a presidential campaign that's including new Latino voices. This is attracting new support for him in early Democratic Party primaries in Nevada, California and Texas.
Photo Credit: Jeff J.Newman/Flickr
Politicians want votos in 2020 -- First, their definitions of Latinos must change
By Michelle García
They are known by many names: Hispanic, Latino, and more recently, Latinx. They are the Bad Hombres. They are scrutinized, and branded as apathetic voters, inscrutable, or closet conservatives. But they are rarely consulted. And, in this most political of years, they are predicted to become the largest non-white electorate in the November presidential election.
Until recently, familiar headlines bore reminders that numbers have not always translated into political attention. “Hispanic voters are growing in power. Why are Democratic presidential candidates ignoring them?” asked The Washington Post. Despite their representing a decisive force at the ballot box, Latinos remain mostly strangers to campaigns and candidates. “Democrats Should Be Worried About the Latino Vote” warned The Atlantic. Democrats, according to the magazine, have failed “to engage Latino voters, address issues beyond immigration reform, and treat Latinos as the influential voting bloc they are,” which amounts to “political malpractice.”
The exception was Senator Bernie Sanders, whose investment in courting Latino voters, specifically in Nevada, helped secure his position as a frontrunner. In the scramble for votes, it’s tempting to argue that Democrats must court Latinos solely for their valuable votes, particularly in key states such as California and Texas.
Such arguments are decisively short-sighted. Overlooked in the election year horse race is the fundamental role of Latinos in redrafting the American narrative necessary to defeat President Donald J. Trump.
If Democrats don’t have a message for Latinos, they don’t have one to disarm Trump.
President Donald J. Trump tours the border wall and crossing at Calexico in California
Credit - US Customs and Border Protection/Flickr
“Invaders” and “Others”
Without a coherent message that includes Latinos – who represent one in every five people in the US —Democrats leave intact a vision of national identity that not only excludes Latinos, but leaves unchallenged a performance of nationality predicated on vilifying Latinos – identity politics as promoted by the Trump administration.
This campaign season demands a reckoning with a powerful, unexamined feature of American cultural and political life: an entitled, judging gaze fixed on Latinos – U.S.-born and immigrants. From this gaze, a deeply entrenched surveillance has emerged – a social panopticon similar to the network of binoculars, cameras and drones stationed across the U.S.-Mexico border.
With the border wall as backdrop and mantra, Trump exploits a violent rhetoric that stretches back to the 1846 US invasion of Mexico led by President James Polk. According to Otto Santa Ana, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who specializes in political linguistics, the inflammatory racial language used today about Latinos has its roots in the same “prejudicial views of different races” that prevailed during the country’s westward expansion in the mid-19th Century.
“Not since James Polk have we had such an anti-Latina/o president,” Santa Ana wrote in a 2018 paper titled, “Trump’s Verbal Animus toward Latinos.”
Previously, in 2017, Santa Ana and a team of student researchers analyzed 300 speeches by Trump and 6000 of his tweets. Trump’s rhetoric, they concluded in the report, “The President’s Intent,” mirrored the mythical version of the nation’s violent conquest: “America, the once great castle on the hill, is besieged. Its walls are broken, its border lays open, and it is overrun by ruthless invaders.”
Under the pretext of protecting the country from these “invaders,” Trump taps a deep root of moral politics that rallies a nation of self-selecting “good people” to stand vigilant against “them.” It’s a narrative rooted in the inception of American exceptionalism, when Native Americans were branded immoral savages.
“Morality helps Americans answer those subversive questions at the heart of every community: Who are we? Who belongs?” wrote James A. Morone in Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. “Racial and moral fears would keep overlapping and soon yield the most potent cleavage in American political culture.”
By casting Latinos of all backgrounds as potential threats to the country, politicians past and present have exacted obedience and submission from Latinos within the nation’s borders through political, cultural and legal surveillance.
Otto Santa Ana pictured above, Photo courtesy of UCLA
A View, Frozen in Time
In the early 20th Century, Texas Mexicans launched insurrections against subjugation, indiscriminate killings and Jim-Crow-like treatment. Across the state, Texas Rangers and vigilante groups hunted and lynched Mexican and Mexican Americans, violence justified as a “bandit war” demanding the imposition of law and order.
Against this backdrop, Texas Governor James E. Ferguson issued a Loyalty Proclamation in 1916 commanding absolute loyalty from ethnic Mexicans living in the state. “In the future when one of these bandit leaders from Mexico comes among you and tries to tell you that Americans want to mistreat you, and wants you to join some secret movement, report him at once to the first officer you can get to,” instructed the governor in a missive published in English and Spanish-language newspapers. “Show that you are loyal to this country.”
Ethnic Mexicans who failed to demonstrate sufficient “loyalty,” warned Ferguson, “will bring trouble upon themselves and many crimes will be committed which cannot be prevented.”
With the Loyalty Proclamation, the government demonstrated its power, outlining for Mexicans the rules for belonging, writes Nicholas Villanueva Jr., author of The Lynching of Mexican Americans in the Texas Borderlands. “Latinos and Anglos understood the government had the power to do and say anything about assimilation and showing your allegiance to the United States,” he said, “It demanded that you were assumed to be a threat.”
It also reinforced the Anglo perception that ethnic Mexicans were unworthy of citizenship while they, the newly arrived, were the arbiters of belonging.
A century later, Trump has ushered in a new era of surveillance, issuing his own proclamations. Anti-Latino sentiment and support for cruelty at the border are now measures of patriotism and litmus tests for belonging. “Nobody loves the Hispanics more,” said Trump about pundit Steve Cortes, at a rally in New Mexico before singling him out for examination. “Who do you like more, the country or the Hispanics?”
At the 2020 State of the Union Address, Trump momentarily paused his vilification of asylum seekers and other migrants to recognize one Latino: Raul Ortiz, the newly appointed deputy chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, a servant of the surveillance.
A government-imposed performance of loyalty may explain why Mexican-born, newly naturalized U.S. citizens and U.S. Latinos will grab cameras and terrorize asylum seekers at the border, as has occurred in El Paso. It explains the fervor of “Latinos for Trump” along the border who deny that the president’s rhetoric is racist. It may explain why a Mexican-born woman in Texas has emerged as a passionate supporter at Trump rallies, as reported by the Dallas Morning News. Journalists and analysts report on these political stances with intense curiosity, studying them for evidence of ethnic betrayal or a deeply embedded strain of conservatism among Latinos.
In this we see a negotiation with “the gaze” in pursuit of acceptance. It’s a replay of the response by ethnic Mexicans to vigilante and extrajudicial violence a century ago. Some joined labor unions or organized armed rebellions, while others motivated by class aspirations and for the sake of belonging, negotiated with “the gaze.” From such compromise came groups such as the League of United Latin American Citizens, which urged members toward aggressive displays of patriotism and military service.
“They were not challenging the terms of the debates but rather saying that they were on the right side of the color line,” wrote Natalia Molina in How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. “Their strategy was to combat the racism directed at them by protecting the rights they had.”
With rhetoric and policy, Trump has staged a violent dramatic thriller of belonging and acceptance, with Latinos and immigrants as subjects of scrutiny. And to this, Democrats largely have no answer, no moral narrative, no inclusive expression of patriotism.
To the contrary, Democrats and liberals, in general, sanction Latino surveillance with a relentless message that casts Latinos as migrants at the border, knocking on the door of acceptance. “The gaze” places Latinos on the far side of the border of social citizenship. It justifies brutal policies at the border, and the never-ending call for more helicopters, drones and “boots on the ground.” It was evident in the hate that motivated a man to drive 10 hours across Texas to massacre Latinos and Mexicans in El Paso.
Even Democrats have loaded the political gun that Trump now fires at the Latinos and the border. “Latino race-baiting and immigrant bashing has become a ritualized practice on the conservative circuit,” wrote Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis in No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border. “In this, Trump is not a departure but rather a continuation of the politics of his predecessors, both Republicans and Democrats.”
Latinos as Suspicious Curiosities
Political surveillance has thrived, largely unnoticed, because observing Mexicans or Latinos –from a distance–has been a central feature of American cultural life. Through watching Mexicans, the U.S. came to know itself. In 19th Century literature, Mexico was “the perfect foil by which young America could reinforce its image of itself,” wrote Cecil Robinson in Mexico and the Hispanic Southwest in American Literature. The earliest U.S. novel about Mexico was published in 1826 by Timothy Flint, a Bostonian who never laid eyes on the place.
Much of U.S. society has long been trained to enjoy viewing Latinos as curiosities. “They are visibly thrilled to be in such foreign territory,” wrote The New York Times in the 1980s, while chronicling an excursion into the Mexican-American neighborhoods of Los Angeles by writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. “The men wear large straw hats with deep creases in the top, like the Mexicans in The Magnificent Seven.”
In 1967, at the height of the civil rights movement, Time magazine informed readers that Mexican-Americans mostly lived in the Southwest “serape belt.” Under the headline, “Pocho’s Progress,” readers peeked into Los Angeles “barrios” with their “tawdry taco joints and rollicking cantinas, the reek of cheap sweet wine competes with the fumes of frying tortillas. The machine-gun patter of slang Spanish is counterpointed by the bellow of lurid hot-rods driven by tattooed pachucos.”
Time recapitulated “the gaze” that reduced Latinos to empty vessels, lacking agency and politically irrelevant. That same year The Atlantic described Mexican-Americans as “The Minority Nobody Knows.” “If they think of them at all,” wrote Helen Rowan, “Easterners are likely to think of Mexican-Americans in terms of wetbacks who cross the border to fester in farm shacks for the miserly wages paid to migratory workers.”
Rowan described a familiar political existence for Latinos, one that bordered on oblivion. “The Democrats have taken them for granted (traditionally about 90 percent of the relatively small registration votes Democratic), and the Republicans haven’t bothered much until recently,” she wrote. “While Democrats complain that they have to deal with leaders who have no followers, they have not financed the kind of block-to-block canvassing and voter registration that would produce organized constituencies.”
Even back then, it was clear that overcoming political irrelevance required redefining the nation’s moral story of justice to include Latinos. “Historically Mexican-Americans have not been seen as a great constitutional and moral issue, as were the Negroes, nor as an ordinary immigrant group to be acculturated or assimilated,” Ernesto Galarza, a union organizer, scholar and writer, told The Atlantic. “They have been looked on simply as an ever-replenishing supply of cheap and docile labor.”
Three years later, in 1970, legendary journalist Rubén Salazar penned a scathing account of Latino political status, asserting that a place in the U.S. narrative demanded an escape from the scrutinizing gaze. In his column for the Los Angeles Times, Salazar wrote: “A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself.”
Instead, “the gaze” has intensified. In Texas, a version of Arizona’s “show me your papers” empowers law enforcement officers, including campus police, to ask anyone they detain, even for traffic violations, about their immigration status. Television shows such as “Border Wars” and the newly launched “To Catch a Smuggler,” a partnership between National Geographic and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, certifies surveillance of brown bodies as entertainment, like the old dime novels, and Texas Ranger books.
Through this collective gaze, asylum seekers from Africa and the Americas, who are forced to wait in Mexico for their cases to be decided, become sources of episodic human drama and generic violence and poverty. This gaze ignores the historical fact that the U.S. has often backed corrupt governments in the countries these people have fled. Their stories, along with images of dead children and squalid conditions in migrant camps, are proffered to Americans for examination: Is this one deserving of medical attention? Should this mother have embarked on the journey?
Identity, According to Whom?
“The gaze” is embedded, identifiable, within the familiar comment, “You don’t look Latino.”
It was the man who smelled of beer and sidled up to me in 2016, as I fished out the cash to cover a tab at a honk-tonk bar near Austin, and who asked, “Where were you born?” From an entitled position, Latinos are told to not speak Spanish. Or, it’s implied they should “go back” to where they came from. Nearly 38 percent of Latinos reported to Pew Research Center that they had been told to “go back,” chastised for speaking Spanish, or been on the receiving end of offensive names in the previous year.
Our political culture has located the nation’s moral battlefield on the U.S.-Mexico border, which explains why Trump officials regularly refer to asylum seekers as criminals. We have become a nation of unofficially deputized Border Patrol agents, operating checkpoints across the country. Through a culture of surveillance, a willing public performs a version of national identity that empowers them to sit in judgment of Latinos.
Julian Castro, on his short-lived campaign trail. Photo courtesy of Flickr and Gage Skidmore.
Out from Under The Gaze
Few people have been better positioned to challenge “the gaze” and dismantle its oppressive effect than Julián Castro. The former presidential hopeful and self-described son of San Antonio was raised in the home of the Alamo, that monument to the nation’s campaign of western expansion. It’s the city where his Mexican immigrant grandmother landed soon after Governor Ferguson issued his Loyalty Proclamation.
On the campaign trail, Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio, cut a striking profile with an unapologetically progressive and inclusive platform. “He did try to talk about excessive police violence. He talked a lot of African American police violence and implied this is a crossover issue for Latinos,” said Ed Morales, author of Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture. “He combined the narrative of immigrants at border, the caging of children with the neglect of Puerto Rico [following Hurricane Maria, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of people.]”
Castro spoke of African slavery as an “original sin,” and of the moral imperative of reparations. “One of those debts we never paid was for that sin of slavery,” he said. Still, Castro was unable to articulate the contours of a legacy of hate and violence that masquerades behind arguments for more border security. Instead, he invoked an American spirit of “compassion.” But charity can’t compete against the pleasure extracted from sitting in judgment. Compassion offers no alternative to surveilling Latinos.
Yet signs of a reckoning are emerging, with a new moral politics crafted by Latinos themselves. “That’s what the X factor could do,” said Morales, referring to the X in Latinx, “It is not simply settling for binary politics in how we see ourselves and how we do politics.”
Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, for example, has claimed a self-narrative that reflects the multitudes of her identity, of a “Latino identity,” Morales said. “She talks about her struggles as a feminist. She identified as working class. She’s in the squad.” And by doing so, she has avoided acquiescing to an assigned ethnic role to satisfy the gaze of another.
Through this lens, political narratives are rewritten. After touring a Border Patrol processing center, Ocasio-Cortez didn’t plead for the humanity of asylum seekers. Instead she fixed a critical eye on the nation’s policies, describing the centers as “concentration camps.”
On the U.S.-Mexico border, Laura Peña, a former prosecutor for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement prosecutor turned immigration lawyer for asylum cases, describes herself as a “reformed fighter.” Seen through the lens of the nation’s racial politics, Peña says her work follows in the legacy of desegregation, fighting against a state apparatus that has resulted in violence and even death. “I believe it is not who we are as a nation, she said, “and it is a very dark period.”
A Latino backlash to “the gaze” in part fueled the adverse reaction to the novel American Dirt, a thriller about a middle-class Mexican mother and child on the run from organized crime. They embark on a migrant journey toward a United States which is depicted as a shining beacon of freedom. It’s a 21st Century version of a 19th Century narrative, complete with a publisher’s note referring to a “faceless brown mass” whose humanity depended on the gaze of a white author, while migrants are empty vessels through which readers can imagine themselves on a heroic journey.
“Rather than look us in the eye, many gabachos prefer to look down their noses at us,” wrote Myriam Gurba in a scathing critique that triggered a literary rebellion uniting Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Salvadorans, among others. “Rather than face that we are their moral and intellectual equals, they happily pity us. Pity is what inspires their sweet tooth for Mexican pain, a craving many of them hide.”
Such flashpoints are potential catalyzing factors, said Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decision, a polling firm that specializes in Latino public opinion. Anger, turned into voter registration, can be leveraged against hate-filled politics and stoke “cross-ethnic unity” among Latinos. “All of that anger created is the prime ingredient to people being very politically engaged,” said Barreto. “We have this incredible potential with all this anger, but someone needs to channel it.”
So far in the Democratic primary season, Bernie Sanders has received praise for a campaign strategy that centers Latinos within a vision of justice based on economic equality. “We do all of this without a Latino department,” Chuck Rocha, senior Sanders advisor, told Yahoo News. “I was sick and tired of Latinos being window dressings for campaigns ... of seeing Latino outreach programs that were siloed off, underfunded, understaffed and never listened to.”
Latino and black support has shot Sanders to the top of polls in Texas and California. But Sanders’ responses to questions about the border leave it unclear whether his moral vision includes a reinterpretation of the border as a political weapon. Still, a moral center that challenges the hateful gaze can be heard among his supporters. “There’s too many people today who think that because they have money they can humiliate Latinos, immigrants, the poor,” Pedro Dominguez, an Iowa construction worker, told the Boston Globe as he caucused for Sanders. “I want to be part of a party that treats everyone equally.”
In the past, ongoing neglect has provoked a bemoaning among Latino leaders about a never-ending struggle for acceptance. Ignoring Latinos will cost Democrats at the polls, they have predicted darkly. Where threats fail, ritual neglect often has caused Latinos to turn inward, performing a self-audit of their economic, political and cultural contributions to American life.
But disarming a narrative of greatness built on the stooped backs of Latinos requires dismantling “the gaze.” There will be no pleading the Latino case, our case. No consent for inspection will be granted. No cataloging of our own merit and self-worth tendered. Instead, from this long-delayed moment Latinos will craft a narrative that sets the nation on a path toward realizing its ideals for all Americans.
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Michelle García is a journalist and essayist and recent Soros Equality Fellow with the Open Society Foundations. This essay was adapted from her article in the forthcoming academic anthology, Democracy on the Line: Trumpism and the Latino Predicament. García is working on a non-fiction book about borders. Twitter: pistoleraprod
Credit: Alan Chin