Trumpism, Mexican America, and the Struggle for Latinx Citizenship

Phillip B. Gonzales, Renato Rosaldo, Mary Louise Pratt, Phillip B. Gonzales, Renato Rosaldo, Mary Louise Pratt

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press Published in Association with School for Advanced Research Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780826362841
• eBook ISBN: 9780826362858
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

For Latinx people living in the United States, Trumpism represented a new phase in the long-standing struggle to achieve a sense of belonging and full citizenship. Throughout their history in the United States, people of Mexican descent have been made to face the question of how they do or do not belong to the American social fabric and polity. Structural inequality, dispossession, and marginalized citizenship are a foundational story for Mexican Americans, one that entered a new phase under Trumpism. This volume situates this new phase in relation to what went before, and it asks what new political possibilities emerged from this dramatic chapter in our history. What role did anti-Mexicanism and attacks on Latinx people and their communities play in Trump's political rise and presidential practices? Driven by the overwhelming political urgency of the moment, the contributors to this volume seek to frame Trumpism's origins and political effects. Published in Association with School for Advanced Research Press.

CHAPTER ONE

Meta-violence, Expulsive Nationalism, and Trumpism’s Crackdown on Mexican America

PHILLIP B. GONZALES

Donald Trump’s rise to power was nothing if not a politics of conflict and divisiveness. Trump made the generation of social conflict a mainstay of his run for president and the taproot of his governing (such as it could be called). Aggression and rancor, not American unification, guided Trump’s political game. They reshaped the practice of politics in the United States, perhaps for good.

A remarkable amount of expert popular and academic analysis addressed this aspect of the Trump phenomenon as it manifested itself. Samira Saramo defined Trumpism as a political movement best examined through the conceptual lens of “meta-violence.” In meta-violence, the use of language relies on “emotional evocations of violence—fear, threats, aggression, hatred, and division” (2017, 2). As core Trumpism, meta-violence grew omnipresent in a process of “slow violence,” Rob Nixon’s phrase denoting a long period of conflicts turning aggression into normal politics, affecting the way “social afflictions” are perceived and addressed (quoted in Saramo 2017, 3).

Strikingly for a presidential creed, Trumpism marked out “enemies of America” from among the people of America itself. In Saramo’s frame, Trumpian meta-violence was expressed in three political modes: “populism,” “strongman politics,” and “identitarianism.” Trumpist populism came out of a prior state of mass resentment of the political establishment. Members of this camp hailed their candidate for being a nonpolitician, rebelling against the Republican Party, being a (falsely assumed) self-made/shrewd businessman, and not afraid to speak for them as common folks even as he boasted of his billions. As strategy, this populism exploited the anxiety and frustration felt by Americans who lived in the “long shadow of the Great Recession,” particularly “largely white, male, non-college-educated, and rural supporters” (Saramo 2017, 9), although the volume of women devoted to Trumpism is yet to be quantified.

Trump’s strongman persona stemmed in part from the mentoring of Roy Cohn, the ruthless, corrupt, “right-wing dirty trickster” who served as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel, conducted anti-Communist witch-hunts in the 1950s, and served as consigliere to New York’s mafia families. Cohn taught Trump to never compromise, always declare victory, and deflect criticism without answering to it (Goldberg 2018). Trump as president (and presidential candidate in 2020) identified with the leadership styles of dictators who commonly resorted to illegal violence against the enemies of their rule. Trump as strongman “marshalled a sense of ‘we’” to protect himself politically along “racial and nativist lines,” starting with his “birther” campaign of 2011 to discredit President Barack Obama, including the accusation that Obama was a Muslim terrorist. The nucleus of a populist constituency emerged here, Trump calling his birther supporters, “great American people . . . unbelievable salt of the earth people” (Saramo 2017, 11–12).

The self-labeled identitarian movement, with roots in European Islamophobic populism, consisted of underground alt-right white supremacy organizations. Trump’s meta-violence stimulated them to come out publicly and they responded with “tremendous” support for Trump. Identitarians prioritized white identity, promoted misogyny, heterosexuality, and Christianity. The likes of the American Nazi Party came to regard Trump as a kind of demigod. According to Richard Spencer, president of a white supremacist think tank who shouted “Hail Trump” at the results of the 2016 presidential election, identitarianism posited “identity as the center—and the central question—of a spiritual, intellectual, and (meta) political movement. . . . And Identity is not just the call of blood, though it is that” (quoted in Saramo 2017, 13).

People of Mexican extraction counted among the many whom Trumpism targeted as “enemies of the people.” This chapter describes some of the major ways that Trumpian meta-violence operated to blot out the principle that Mexicans and Mexican Americans belong to the social fabric and political community of the United States. In addition to populism, strongman tactics, and identitarianism, this chapter shows, Mexicans were targeted through the medium of white nationalism, which congealed not only in the president, but as thoughts and behaviors across ordinary citizens, elected officials, and policy wonks. I conclude by highlighting some of the ways Mexican America sought to fight off the Trumpian assault, suggesting that Mexicans are indeed integral parts of the American “community.”

White Nationalism in Base Assailment

One day in early 2019, Dulce Nereyda, her daughter, and her mother browsed the aisles of a Walmart in Phoenix when out of nowhere, according to the online account, “an unnamed bearded man began yelling at them for speaking Spanish.” As Nereyda posted on Facebook, “This man starts yelling, ‘I can’t wait until Trump does away with you all!’” Pointing to the fear in the eyes of her daughter, Nereyda exclaims, “Excuse me?” The accoster, who in Nereyda’s phone-recording video looms as a large white man, shouts, “Leave, just leave. YOU DON’T BELONG HERE!” Walking straight at him, Nereyda fires back, “So, do you want to tell me to get out again? Because this is my country, too.” The man reiterates his support for Trump, warning of the coming “wall” (quoted in Simón 2019).

If in his strongman persona Donald Trump operated as “a big bully,” his meta-violence clearly enabled what one commentator called “many little bullies (Heer 2016). As Saramo notes, meta-violence is “closely bound to emotion” (2017, 3). The man who accosted Nereyda, whom I shall call Burly White Guy (BWG) for ease of identification, did so in a heat of anger. However, far from a singular outburst, it represented a general behavior pattern. Under Trumpism, “base assailment” despoiled everyday life. Members of Trump’s “belligerent faction” (Krugman 2020) openly harassed individuals of certain color, Asians, Asian Americans, Arabs, Arab Americans, people mistaken for Muslims, as well as Jews.

Enacted by BWG, base assailment would seem masculinist, perhaps misogynistic. However, a YouTube video (ABC7 2020) enables the witnessing of a middle-aged white woman, walking through Wilson Park in Los Angeles, becoming irritated at a young Asian American woman as she worked out on concrete steps that the lady is about descend. In the course of a tense exchange, Wilson Park White Lady (WPWL) lets fly: “Go back to whatever f*****g Asian country you came from. This is not your home.” In the backdrop, President Trump had just racialized the COVID-19 pandemic, calling it the “Kung Flu” and the “Chinese virus.” On the macho meter, WPWL outdid BWG, hounding her mark with “my whole family is going to f**k you up.” All too soon, the base lashing of Asians and Asian Americans spiked in Facebook and Twitter hashtags (Alba 2021), upticking to a record-breaking volume of hate crimes, including the physical beating of elderly persons on the street, the grotesque “you don’t belong here” profaning the legacy of the 2020 presidential election (Hong et al. 2021).

Sara Ahmed argues that white hate works to “secure collectives” (2014, 41). It promotes the fantasy of the “ordinary white subject . . . a fantasy that comes into being through the mobilization of hate as a passionate attachment closely tied to love” (of one’s whiteness). In a state of rage, the ordinary white person self-defines as the “real victim” (43). The politics of meta-violence becomes the means of realizing the passion.

Both WPWL and BGW told their targets to “get out,” Nereyda to Mexico presumably, and the young woman in the park “to whatever . . . Asian country you came from.” Logically, the phrases were meta-violent expressions of nationalism in the sense of wanting to keep certain elements out of the bordered territorial state. More specifically, they reflected Trumpism as white nationalism, the banishing of people of color in particular. How, one can well ask, did white nationalism in the Trump administration evolve?

In the presidential campaign of 2015–2016, observers suspected that what Donald Trump meant by “Make America Great Again” was some unseemly sense of nationalism. In a speech at a Houston rally, Trump defiantly pronounced that he was a nationalist, and he exhorted the members of his excited crowd to make nationalism their identity as well (Cummings 2018).

When the chief executive of a territorial state (the so-called “nation-state”) invokes nationalism, theorists call it “dominant nationalism” (as opposed to the nationalism of, say, a regional minority). When the expression of nationalism includes the most advantaged group in the state system, it reflects dominant ethnoracial nationalism. Especially in the context of a multicultural state, dominant nationalism is generally called upon to affirm what grouping it is that constitutes its privileged “nation” or “sovereign body” (Wimmer 2002, 1–2).

In a speech delivered at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Trump seemed to herald delimited nation. Sounding much like a modern liberal, he exclaimed, “Every day I wake up determined to deliver for the people I have met all across this nation that have been neglected, ignored, and abandoned.” The candidate meant what a sociologist calls “reformed liberalism” (Haltinner 2018, 450), the Tea Party view of working people victimized into inequality by the liberal state. “I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals,” Trump (2016) put it. “These are the forgotten men and women of our country, and they are forgotten, but they’re not going to be forgotten long. These are people who work hard but no longer have a voice. I AM YOUR VOICE.”

Stephen K. Bannon, the former executive chair of the far-right Breitbart News, who came on as chief adviser late in Trump’s campaign for president, reinforced Trumpism as a working-class movement. Bannon, stylizing himself a rough-hewn intellectual light of US populism, saw such a politics as part of the rising populist movements in Europe (Green 2018a, 109). Trump came off in such a scenario as a champion of conservative, religious, small-town America. If the self-appointed Braveheart promised safekeeping for the legatees of economic restructuring (1980s decline of industrialization and family farms) or current downfalls in extractive industries (Potts 2019), he signaled what Benedict Anderson (1983) would have called “nation-ness,” in this case, an imagined electoral nation. Wolff called it Trump’s pocketed “35 percent” (2018, 179). The 35 percent put Trump over in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan (Cohn and Palapiano 2018).

In theory, the 35 percent might have spelled a European-style populist administration, a form of government that would have suited Bannon. However, “working class” was not the only code for Trump’s base of support. A racial undercurrent shimmied through. Ethnographic observations suggested an enmeshment of race and class. Many white rural Americans lived in isolated, low-income hamlets and towns, defining government as primarily concerned with giving immigrants and minorities welfare preferment (Potts 2019). Those in former smokestack suburban communities burned with particular resentment toward African Americans but also Latinx immigrants (Cherlin 2019).

Nevertheless, 35 percent would not have been enough nationally. Overall white non-Hispanic voters went for Trump by 21 percentage points, 58 percent for Trump versus 37 percent for Clinton (Tyson and Maniam 2016). Trump also won among white college graduates, 49 percent versus 45 percent for Clinton, women going surprisingly strong for him (Smarsh 2018). Emphasis on white economic anxiety hid a greater “racial anxiety” (Ali 2018). “Just plain whiteness” seemed to be at stake (Smarsh 2018). Leonard Pitts (2018) put it in dominant nationalistic terms: Trump, Republicans, and 64 million voters “sold out America on a promise of white primacy.”

With such a showing, Trump might have gone on to develop an “insidious” nationalism based on a policy of ethnic majority rule akin to dominant Hindu nationalism in India (Nehru [1953] 2018). Indeed, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi resembled Trump, thriving on a policy of social divisiveness (Shear 2019). One problem, however, involved the profit-obsessed, “ultra-rich financiers” and hedge-fund moguls, a kind of “one-percenter” nation that Trump favored with massive tax cuts and deregulation (Tankersley 2016; Hohman 2018). For them, an explicit ethnoracial nationalism would not have worked.

Yet Trump saw where his obsessive base lay. As alt-right innovator Richard Spencer put it during the Trump presidency, “On a gut level, [Trump] kind of senses that this is about demographics, ultimately. We’re moving into a new America” (quoted in LeTourneau 2019). Spencer here evoked the white supremacist fear of “demography as destiny” (Judis and Teixeira 2002), the theory of the “great replacement” of whites by migrants from the Global South, as this fear had disseminated to the United States from conservative populism in Europe. Bannon believed in the race-threat philosophy popularized in the writings of the French traditional extremists Jean Raspail and Renaud Camus (Peltier 2020). In the United States, the fear of alien races leaving whites out in the cold sounded in the slogan “Diversity equals white genocide” (ADL n.d.). To Spencer, Trump had “an unconscious vision that white people have, that their grandchildren might be a hated minority in their own country. I think that scares us. They probably aren’t able to articulate it. I think it’s there. I think that, to a great degree, explains the Trump phenomenon” (quoted in LeTourneau 2019).

As the 2020 presidential election neared and his poll numbers dipped below those of Joe Biden, Trump blew the white-nationalist dog whistle, retweeting a video of a supporter sporting “Trump 2020” and “America First” signs on his golf cart while shouting “white power!” to Trump opponents (Shear 2020). The president even sounded the theme of replacement in a Fourth of July speech affirming, “We will never allow an angry mob to tear down our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children. And we will defend, protect and preserve (the) American way of life, which began in 1492 when Columbus discovered America” (Berry and Madhani 2020). Never mind that Columbus never set foot on the land that became the United States.

Expulsive Ethno-nationalism

When dominant nationalists perceive elements threatening their sovereignty, they automatically seek those elements’ exclusion “from the privileged seats in the theatre of society by virtue of their ethnic background” (Wimmer 2002, 4; see also Gellner 1964, 168). “Exclusion” commonly refers to marginalization in relation to mainstream institutions. However, as Rubén Rumbaut (2017) noted, Trumpism’s random and purposed exclusionary actions often included a policy of outright national expulsion. The emotive force of Trumpism’s meta-violence evoked what can be called a meta-violence of “expulsive nationalism.” Trump treated people of color with expulsive disdain. For example, he pushed to have undocumented individuals not counted in the 2020 census in spite of the US Constitution’s stipulation that all “inhabitants” be recorded. If it had passed, the policy would have spelled a meta-violent hurt put on the individual states of the Union as much as the undocumented (Turner 2020).

Back at the Phoenix Walmart, Burly White Guy made a grandstand for American nativism. His verbal violence demanded literal expulsion for the violation of speaking Spanish in an American national framework, evidenced as he roared to Nereyda, “Leave, just leave. YOU DON’T BELONG HERE!” As the online report affirmed, across the United States speaking Spanish—or any other non-English language—could subject one to “offensive and racist comments” and mistreatment (Simón 2019). Trump had cued up the issue during the presidential campaign, taunting rival Jeb Bush for speaking Spanish on the stump. “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish,” Trump jabbed. The Trump campaign did not reach out to Spanish-speaking voters with Spanish-language ads, relying totally on white support (Goldmacher 2016).

It is important to note that, through the lens of nativism, the objection to speaking Spanish is not the same as biological race prejudice. Nineteenth-century nativism hailed Anglo-Saxon values, customs, and practices as the fundament of American culture during the era of Manifest Destiny (Higham 2002). In the new millennium, nativism revitalized in the face of powerful forces of globalization. More immediate roots to Trumpism lay in the conservative hysteria over the rise of undocumented migration starting in the 1970s (Massey, Durand, and Pren 2016). In this decade, Congressman Tom Tancredo (Colorado) and Steve King (Iowa) embarked on a campaign to pass English-only and anti–bilingual education laws in their respective states. Tellingly for white nationalism, Tancredo later founded his campaign for the 2008 presidential election on one principle: “Massive uncontrolled illegal immigration threatens our survival as a nation” (OnTheIssues n.d.; Gabriel 2019a).

The speaking of Spanish has a long, unbroken history in the United States, since the forcible annexation of Mexico’s northern territories in the mid-nineteenth century (Lozano 2018). Dulce Nereyda educated BWG that English was not the sole language of the country. Yet Tancredo tried making it so in a proposed amendment to the US Constitution to designate English as the official US language (US Congress, 2007). Stoking fear of replacement, King pledged to fight alleged threats of foreign cultural influence on “Western culture” and “Western civilization” (Gabriel 2019b). Twenty-seven Republican-controlled states advanced Anglo-Saxon nationalism by defining English as their official language in the 1980s–1990s, including Arizona.

Had they been honest enough, they would have realized that Spanish posed no threat to the dominance of English. Statistical research found that Latinx immigrants were picking up English successfully through family generations (Krogstad, Stepler, and López 2015). But of course, the point was to push “white”-inflected nationalism. As such, it is highly likely that Trump was keyed to attack Bush on the language issue by Stephen Miller, his chief speech-writer during the campaign, whose own right-wing perspective included a bitter opposition to Spanish speaking as an expression of disloyalty to American patriotism (Guerrero 2020, 56–57, 61, 71).

Alien Crime as a Threat to American Civilization

The English-only movement would serve as a springboard for King and Tancredo to chum it up with Trump, going on to dance around another pet white nationalist pairing: immigration and crime. Trump stamped his presidential calling with immigration reform, shrouding the issue in a kind of anti-Mexican nationalism (Varela 2019).

Prior to running for president, Trump was “the furthest thing from a racial innocent,” with his racist tendency showing not only in his “birther” attack on Obama. In 1989, he spent $85,000 for full-page ads in New York newspapers to condemn five Black teenagers accused of raping a white female jogger in Central Park, failing to apologize when they were later exonerated of the crime (Green 2018a, 1001). Yet, for purposes of a presidency, Trump needed to learn how to be a more effective racializer, the better for pandering to white prejudice. To beef up this side of his political portfolio, he appropriated the material of racism that circulated through extremists and the media. Journalist Charlie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Meta-violence, Expulsive Nationalism, and Trumpism’s Crackdown on Mexican America
• Chapter Two. To Wield and Exceed the Law: Mexicans, Migration, and the Dream of Herrenvolk Democracy
• Chapter Three. Deconstructing Trumpism: Lessons from the Recent Past and for the Near Future
• Chapter Four. Reckoning with the Gaze
• Chapter Five. Artist versus Ideologue: Two American Dystopias
• Chapter Six. I Won’t Tell My Story: Narrative Capital and Refusal among Undocumented Activists in the Trump Era
• Chapter Seven. How Did We Get Here? Central Americans and Immigration Policy from Reagan to Trump
• Chapter Eight. This Too Shall Pass: Mexican-Immigrant Replenishment and Trumpism
• Chapter Nine. Decolonizing Citizenship: The Movement for Ethnic Studies in Texas
• Epilogue
• References
• List of Contributors
• Index