I once came across a video of a curious little incident that had occurred at a Trump rally being held in Austin, Texas. At one point during the rally, a Mexican American woman named María de Jesús addressed the assembled Trump supporters. According to Taylor Goldenstein, who was covering the event for the Austin American-Statesman, Ms. De Jesús, a representative of a group called Latino Trump Coalition USA, had clearly identified herself to those in attendance as a recently naturalized U.S. citizen.
One would have assumed that these Trump supporters, given their devotion to the rule of law, would have lauded this woman. After all, she had done it the so-called “right way.”
As video footage of the incident shows, however, this Latina for Trump was not met with approval and applause, but was instead shouted down by a loud chorus of Trump’s “Build The Wall!” chant.
So why didn’t the Trump supporters at this rally embrace this recently naturalized Mexican American as a model immigrant and one of their own? Well, it’s complicated, but, in a nutshell, it’s because the anti-Mexican sentiment at the core of Trumpism isn’t just about Mexican immigrants. It’s also, and perhaps primarily, about the large, politically intractable population of Mexican Americans in the Southwest.
To fully understand the Trump administration’s aggressive posture towards Mexican immigrants, you really need to spend some time exploring the dystopian white supremacist ideology at the core of Trumpism.
As Jane Coaston of Vox explained in an article entitled “The Scary Ideology of Trump’s Immigration Instincts,” the Trump administration has embraced the once “fringe theory” of the far right that advances the notion that “white people are being systematically ‘erased’ by their inferiors.” According to this theory, “white Americans, and white culture, are threatened by a slow-running ‘genocide’ via demographic replacement.”
Key members of the Trump administration, both past and present, have openly espoused what is commonly referred to as the “genocide” theory. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, for example, was fond of openly referencing “The Camp of The Saints,” an obscure French novel by Jean Raspail that portrays the world in terms of an epic struggle to save the white race from destruction at the hands of a mob of nonwhite immigrants.
Although Bannon may be out of the White House, Coaston warns that “his attitudes regarding immigration and immigrants remain in place, voiced by fellow immigration restrictionists like [Stephen] Miller who believe that immigration poses a danger to American culture and American life—unless that immigration is from a predominantly white country.”
Of course, the genocide theory isn’t exactly new. The modern, Mexican-centric version has been incubating, in one form or another, inside Republican intellectual circles for decades. Pat Buchanan, for example, ran on a version of this theory for the Republican presidential nomination in both 1992 and 1996 and as the Reform Party presidential candidate in 2000.
Buchanan also consistently pedaled the theory in a series of books with provocative titles like “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?,” “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America,” and “Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.” In each of these diatribes, Buchanan, often citing Neo-Nazi sources and echoing positions advanced by anti-Mexican hate groups like American Patrol, warned specifically of the existential threat posed to America by the burgeoning numbers of Mexican Americans in the Southwest whom he consistently characterized as a politically disruptive force in American society.
In “State of Emergency,” for example, in a section entitled “The Aztlan Strategy,” Buchanan impugns the collective loyalty of Mexican Americans to the United States, and, at one point, rather hysterically warns of a vast and nefarious plot on the part of Mexican Americans to ‘reannex’ the Southwestern United States in the name of Mexico.
Conservative luminary, Ann Coulter, pedaled a similar Mexican-centric version of the genocide theory. In her book “¡Adios, America! -The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole,” in a chapter entitled “Thirty Million Mexicans,” Coulter characterized the demographic changes that have occurred in the Southwestern United States “as a national homicide made to look like suicide.” Not surprisingly, she appeared particularly distressed about the growing population of Mexican Americans in the Southwest indignantly noting, at one point, that the “Hispanic population, overwhelmingly Mexican, makes up 47 percent of New Mexico, 39 percent of California, 38 percent of Texas, 30 percent of Arizona, and 27 percent of Nevada.”
Of course, by this point, we know that the genocide theory would eventually reemerge to form, as Steve Bannon proudly noted, the ‘intellectual infrastructure’ of Trump’s presidential campaign. To this day, the theory continues to feature prominently in the language of the Trump administration serving as the central idea behind the ‘invasion’ rhetoric so frequently invoked by the Trump administration and Trump allies like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
We also know that this rhetoric served to inspire Patrick Crusius, by his own admission, to execute what can only be described as the worst massacre of ethnic Mexicans in modern American history.
So, to my fellow Mexican Americans, many of whom have disparaged both Mexican immigrants and the Mexican American protestors trying to defend them in places like Los Angeles, I would just say that Trump and many of his supporters don’t want you here either. It isn’t difficult, especially in some of the darker corners of the Internet, to find calls to deport Mexican Americans regardless of their political affiliation.
There’s really no need, however, to even venture all that deep into the wilderness to find calls to deport Mexican Americans. Just recently, a former Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Utah named Sam Parker issued an unapologetic call to deport Selena Gomez because she happened to express sympathy for the plight of immigrants on a now deleted social media post.
To many Republicans, immigration from Mexico, whether legal or not, is just one part of the problem. The other more serious problem in their view, especially from a political perspective, is the burgeoning population of Mexican Americans in the Southwest who, if ever fully activated, could potentially end Republican hegemony in places like Texas.
