Being Mexican in MAGA America

[struggle4progress]

By Gustavo Arellano
Columnist
June 13, 2025 3 AM PT

... All Padilla did was identify himself and try to question Noem about the immigration raids across Southern California that have led to protests and terror. Instead, federal agents pushed the senator into a hallway, forced him to the ground and handcuffed him before he was released. He and Noem talked privately afterward, yet she claimed to reporters that Padilla “lung[ed]” at her despite them being far apart and video showing no evidence to back up her laughable assertion ...

The manhandling of Padilla on Thursday and his subsequent depiction by conservatives as a modern-day Pancho Villa isn’t surprising one bit. Trashing people of Mexican heritage has been one of Trump’s most successful electoral planks — don’t forget that he kicked off his 2016 presidential campaigns by proclaiming Mexican immigrants to be “rapists” and drug smugglers — because he knows it works. You could be a newcomer from Jalisco, you could be someone whose ancestors put down roots before the Mayflower, it doesn’t matter: For centuries, the default stance in this country is to look at anyone with family ties to our neighbor to the south with skepticism, if not outright hate.

It was the driving force behind the Mexican-American War and subsequent robbing of land from the Mexicans who decided to stay in the conquered territory. It was the basis for the legal segregation of Mexicans across the American Southwest in the first half of the 20th century and continues to fuel stereotypes of oversexed women and criminal men that still live on mainstream and social media.

These anti-Mexican sentiments are why California voters passed a slew of xenophobic local and state measures in the 1980s and 1990s when the state’s demographics began to dramatically change. Conservative politicians and pundits alike claimed Mexico was trying to reclaim the American Southwest and called the conspiracy the “Reconquista,” after the centuries-long push by Spaniards to take back the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors during the Middle Ages ...

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-06-13/sen-alex-padillas-crime-being-mexican-in-maga-america

[brush]

1. Agreed, Padilla being Mexican American had much to do with the thuggery he endured. Even MSM and cable...

talking heads repeated Cosplay Barbie's words that he lunged towards her and didn't ID himself...an outright lie as videos clearly had audio of him ID himself as a US SENATOR.

I highly doubt a white senator would've been manhandled and roughed up like that.

The worm will turn on trump and his incompetent clown car cabinet. I suggest Latinos, Blacks, LGBTQ+ folks, Muslims and progressive white form a tight coalition that stands strong together against these fascist MFers and what they're trying to install in the nation.