Glad to see this benefit concert taking place in El Paso soon in order to say "no" to white supremacy. And as UCLA Professor Dr. Matt Barreto indicates, I, too, feel confident that these sentiments will show up at the ballot box in 2020.
-Angela Valenzuela
#ElPasoStrong
#ElPasoFirme
#TurnTexasBlue
#TexasIsABattlegroundState
In Texas, a call to action against white supremacy
Opinion by Michelle García
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| Michelle García |
(CNN) In many
parts of Texas there are phrases rarely mentioned in polite company, white
supremacy being one of them.
Never mind the state's history of war campaigns fueled by a thirst for slavery.
Never mind the once pervasive presence of the Ku Klux Klan on school boards and newspaper
editorial pages and the savage lynching of Mexican-Americans.
Never mind that it's still possible to see white police officers mounted on horseback parading
a black man down the street by a rope.
But on September 7, a little more than one month after a gunman
in a racially motivated attack killed 22 people in El Paso and following
another gunman's shooting rampage in the cities of Midland and Odessa,
pleasantries and politics will be cast aside. Immigrant rights groups and the
Border Network for Human Rights have organized a concert, the
El Paso Firme Music Fest, that includes performances from world-class musicians
such as Residente and Ana Tijoux and is presented as a call to action against
white supremacy.
Organizers seem intent on disabusing anyone of the notion that
ongoing hateful anti-immigrant sentiment and violent debates about border
security are simply policy differences about law and order, not expressions of
racism. They are right in this — the El Paso violence was an attack on Mexicans,
as a prior statement attributed to the gunman makes clear. Anyone familiar with
the lexicon of race in Texas knows, for most, "Mexican" refers to
citizen, non-citizen, green card holders and Tejanos whose roots in the state
predate the battle of the Alamo.
On concert day, 78-year-old El Paso resident Guillermo Glenn,
who survived the massacre and who grew up near Odessa and still has family
there, will be among the speakers. He plans to correct some misperceptions
about the deadliest attack on Latinos in modern history. Rather than a remote
racist ideological island or aberration, the massacre was the violent
expression of an ongoing assault against Latinos in Texas.
"The incident is very clearly defined (as a) terrorist act,
but you can't see the institutional racism," Glenn recently told me in El
Paso. "It's very difficult to distinguish the whole ideology from the
system that hides it."
The signs are obvious to those who look.
The state's massive racial wealth inequality — which the former state demographer partly attributed to generational
discrimination— was reflected in the details of the El Paso massacre
itself. The confessed killer belonged to one of the state's most overwhelmingly
white and wealthiest counties and attacked a city where the mainly Latino
workforce earns one-half the median income of
whites. He also traveled over
600 miles out of his way to attack this community.
Racist ideology, says Glenn, was already blatantly on display in
the El Paso area just days before the massacre. "What would attract the
white supremacist," asked Glenn. "Well, you already have armed white
supremacists who are right on the edge of the city."
The group Glenn was referring to as attracting white
supremacists is "We Build the
Wall," a privately funded so-called border wall in the
tiny town of Sunland Park, New Mexico, just a few miles from downtown El Paso.
The group's web site describes its mission to "unite
private citizens that share a common belief in providing national security for
our Southern Border through the construction, administration and maintenance of
physical barriers inhibiting illegal entry into the United States." A week
before the massacre Kris Kobach and Steve Bannon, supporters of the wall
project, traveled to the site for a weekend “symposium.”
Interestingly, not one of the five locals, mostly Latinos, who I
spoke with in Sunland Park last week could locate the wall or mentioned the
so-called security symposium.
To be sure, the wall brigade and relentless mentions of an
"invasion" by President
Trump are echoed in the confessed killer's written statement. But that's just
the surface level connection and it obscures the backdrop of ongoing political
warfare against Latinos in the state.
"We have been bullied, our community has been bullied
relentlessly to give up our power," said Antonio Arellano, interim
executive director of Jolt Action, a statewide group to mobilize Latinx voters.
"This was motivated by the fact that we are growing in influence and
political power."
At least one prominent Republican appears to agree. Artemio
Muniz, the chairman of the Federation of Hispanic Republicans, told NBC that the
gunman's statement, which referenced white replacement and Latino ascent to
political power that ushers an end of the Republican grip on politics, echoes
language used by party members.
"We can sit here and say 'Trump,' but it's been going on
for years," Muniz said.
In 2006, long before Trump rattled the political class with
phrases of "bad hombres" at the border, Texas' current lieutenant
governor, Dan Patrick, rallied a base when he ran for a state Senate seat by
making "stop the invasion"
his battle cry and sounding false alarms about immigrants carrying "Third World diseases."
This was conveniently overlooked when Patrick responded to the
El Paso shooting by asking "what do we expect"
when kids are allowed to play video games instead of going church. (Patrick
also issued a brief statement on
his web site after the shooting.)
It should be unsurprising that someone would perceive an
"invasion" after state lawmakers attempted to deny birth certificates to
the US-born children of undocumented
immigrants, according to the Texas Tribune. The notion that all
Latinos are somehow suspect makes sense in a state that effectively legalized
racial profiling with its controversial "show me your papers" (SB4)
law, which was adopted two years ago.
Any notion that race was not the issue was dispelled before the
final vote in the Legislature when former state Rep. Matt Rinaldi, whose
district is a 30-minute drive from the El Paso's suspect's hometown, bragged to
Latino Democrats that he had summoned immigration agents in response to
disruptive Latino activists who were protesting in the
House gallery.
Three years ago, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has
released statements expressing sympathies for victims in both El Paso and
Odessa and Midland shootings, waged a vicious legal battle to defend SB4. A
federal court partially upheld the law.
In a state where no Texas Democrat has won statewide
office in 25 years, the 21-year-old El Paso killer belongs to a generation that
grew up at a time when predictions of a blue Texas are
discussed, by some, as a defeat akin to the battle at the Alamo.
And lawmakers have acted accordingly. Texas has one of the
toughest voter ID laws, which are known to heavily impact voter turnout among
non-whites. Gerrymandering and the lengthy legal challenges against it by civil
rights groups was close to a way of life in Texas. Earlier this year, the
state attempted to purge the voter rolls of
noncitizens and the citizenship of nearly 100,000 registered
voters were questioned. A tiny fraction, roughly 80, were
ultimately deemed ineligible but not before the list was shared with local
election authorities.
The blanket claims of "hate" rest on a system of
power. The massacre represented the violent culmination of political warfare.
If this was not already clear through policy, it was spelled out the day before
the massacre when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent a fundraising letter calling
on supporters to "DEFEND" the state against "illegal
immigrants" and equating demographics with electoral change shows.
The fear of change is not unfounded. Trump's margin of victory
in Texas is easily quashed by
mobilizing the 3 million eligible Latino
voters in Texas, who didn't cast a ballot.
In his so-called "manifesto," the alleged killer
described an impending Texas future as a Democratic stronghold that would
result in the "destruction" of the nation and he targeted people
whose citizenship and claim to political rights have been systematically and
relentlessly attacked in Texas: Latinos.
According to a
Texas Department of Public Safety report obtained by the Texas Tribune, he told
police he went into the Walmart, then back out to his car to complete and
publish the manifesto before returning to the store to kill El Pasoans and
Mexican shoppers from Juarez.
Attacking Latinos is deeply woven into the genetic coding of the
state that was built on the perception that some are more worthy to govern than
others. In the 1968 history "Lone Star: A History of Texas and the
Texans," regarded as "canonical," by
some, author T.R. Fehrenbach described the growing Latino population as
analogous to an invasion and civil rights gains that curtailed state-sponsored
oppression as a Texas retaken by the Latinos via the ballot box.
Even after the massacre, efforts at marginalization shamelessly
persist. In response to the massacre, Abbott named a task force. Of the 18
members appointed to, in Abbott's words, "root out the extremist
ideologies that fuel hatred and violence in our state," three are women
and one is Latino. Even in death, the claim to power is evident. At the recent
memorial, which drew thousands, the speakers included
a parade of mostly white elected officials and not one member of the victims'
families.
But to some, the relentless campaign of marginalization and
dehumanization has a galvanizing effect. Arellano, Jolt's director, tells his
group's Latinx members and eligible voters, "We measure our freedom by
courage. When we are afraid, we are no longer free." And, he says, that
the suppression is indicative of the political potential of Latinos in the
state.
Indeed, Latinos are projected to be the largest non-white voting
group in 2020, according to estimates
by the Pew Research Center. There are indications that anti-Latino,
anti-immigrant rhetoric will have a mobilizing effect on Latino voters. Matt
Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions, says that his research shows strong
intent among Latino registered voters in Texas to come out to the polls in 2020
and that many in the community say they view Trump and Republicans as hostile
to Latinos.
Despite the oppressive climate and now outright violence, none
of the Democratic presidential candidates have addressed the unique strain of
racism toward Latinos in its full historical scope and context. In the upcoming
debate on September 12, in Houston, Democrats have a chance to speak to this
generation's deep hostility toward Latinos who now fear becoming victim 23 and
who represent a potentially decisive vote in Texas.
On Saturday, in El Paso, however, artists, clergy, musicians and
the public will be creating a language, a message to define the moment — an end
to white supremacy. And it's long overdue.
This article has been corrected to identify the Border Network
for Human Rights, not the Poor People's Campaign, as the main organizers of
Saturday's concert.
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