Posted on 07/07/2015 7:45:00 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
In recent days, despite substantial business and financial losses, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has doubled down on his anti-Mexican rhetoric. Along with repeating his claims about rapists and criminals, Trump added the argument that “tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border,” among other extreme assertions. While many of Trump’s fellow GOP presidential hopefuls have worked to distance themselves from his xenophobia, Senator Ted Cruz has supported Trump. And prominent right-wing media leaders have likewise expressed their agreement, from Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity to Ann Coulter, whose most recent book, Adios America!, is an extended, xenophobic diatribe against Mexican-American immigrants and culture.
Such anti-Mexican sentiments have a long history in American culture and politics. Indeed, many of Trump’s recent comments echo quite closely a 1928 speech delivered by Texas Congressman John Box. Box was arguing for including Mexican immigrants in the newly passed Quota Acts, the nation’s first immigration laws to apply to most arrivals, and extended the same white supremacist xenophobia that had produced the Quota Acts to his subject: “Every reason which calls for the exclusion of the most wretched, ignorant, dirty, diseased, and degraded people of Europe or Asia,” he began, “demands that the illiterate, unclean, peonized masses moving this way from Mexico be stopped at the border.” After moving through familiar complaints about stolen jobs and racial “mongrelization,” in his closing two paragraphs he expressed the precise litany of fears and prejudices we’re hearing again these days:
To keep out the illiterate and the diseased is another essential part of the Nation's immigration policy. The Mexican peons are illiterate and ignorant. Because of their unsanitary habits and living conditions and their vices they are especially subject to smallpox, venereal diseases, tuberculosis, and other dangerous contagions. Their admission is inconsistent with this phase of our policy.
The protection of American society against the importation of crime and pauperism is yet another object of these laws. Few, if any, other immigrants have brought us so large a proportion of criminals and paupers as have the Mexican peons.
Thanks to the rise of national immigration laws that began with the Quota Acts, Trump can now add “illegal aliens” to his list of attacks; otherwise, the rhetoric is identical.
There are lots of ways to push back against this anti-Mexican xenophobia and bigotry, but the most salient is that it gets the history not only wrong, but precisely backwards. For one thing, most of the continent has had a Mexican (initially Spanish) population for far longer than an Anglo or U.S. one. There’s a reason why Florida’s St. Augustine is the oldest continuously occupied settlement in the continental U.S. Or why the first Anglo settlers in Texas were invited there by the Mexican government. Or why a city like San Diego had been a Spanish and then Mexican community for more than a century by the time of the annexation of California and the first Anglo arrivals. The story of European exploration and settlement in what would become the United States has been inextricably tied to Hispanic communities at every moment.
Moreover, the story of the American Southwest and West is defined by a long series of Anglo crimes against Mexican landowners and communities. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican American War guaranteed U.S. citizenship and legal protection for those hundreds of thousands of Mexicans already inhabiting the numerous territories that were changing hands. But in practice, those protections were time and again denied to Mexican landowners, in favor of Anglo squatters and thieves who took the land they desired and bent the laws to support their crimes. Novelist María Amparo Ruiz de Burton captured this forgotten history in her epic The Squatter and the Don (1885), while Indian reformer Helen Hunt Jackson noted the parallels between the U.S. treatment of Mexican and Native Americans in the West in her own epic Ramona (1884).
Our modern immigration laws and system are fraught and broken, and there are no simple solutions or next steps. But echoing and amplifying the kinds of anti-Mexican sentiments that long permeated our communal conversations certainly won’t help. And neither will arguing that Mexican arrivals are either a new American community or a group of criminals taking over our existing communities—indeed, as our shared history reveals, both those descriptions fit Anglo arrivals far better.
****
Ben Railton is an Associate Professor of English at Fitchburg State University and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.
Shouldn’t this chap be an equal opportunity complainer at the least?
Canada/USA/Mexico all crashed the American Indians’ party. If you’re going to look at it that way. Probably the land was pristine prior to that.
Comments?
Remember the Alamo.
Exactly!
I've heard much, much lower estimates of how many Mexicans actually lived in the territories that changed hands. And "hundreds of thousands" could be anywhere from 200,000 to 900,999. Pretty imprecise estimating.
You know he's a Democrat, because the breathless typist of this screed would have told us if he was a Republican.
Rep. John Box (D) Former Representative from Texas’s 2nd District
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/john_box/401672
What this jackass calls xenophobia is what I call ‘survival sense.’
Somebody should make this fool take a walk through Nuevo Laredo some night and see what he thinks afterwards. The Cholos would like to meet him, I’m sure.
Another “professor” who would fail any REAL college class.
What a maroon.
This guy must be part Palestinian - fails to understand that there is a price paid for losing a war.
I will stand corrected by any sons or daughters of the Alamo, but as I recall, we still paid $18,250,000 after kicking their ass just because we’re nice. Finally, last time I checked, Texas was an independent country when it joined the union, not a part of Mexico
So the Spanish/Mexicans were the invading peoples who stole the land from the noble Indians!
We, collectively known as whitey, confiscated the land from the descendents of those slightly darkish Europeans who stole it anyway.
In a way, whitey was Robin Hood, and Mexicans were the Banditos de Nottingham.
History's so confusing!
Those like Trump who can, do.
Those like this egghead who can’t, “teach”.
So, this English professor is commenting on immigration policies and opinions? Why does he deem himself to be an expert in this area?
Remember Goliad. Where over 300 Texans under Fannin were brutally executed while dtinking at a water wagon as a ruse under Santa Ana’s orders after surrendering with a promise of release. They were released to God.
The Mexican Army were no Angels and were brutal to Texicans.
But, fate had the entire Mexican Army and El Presidente defeated I just 18 minutes at San Jacinto. Long live the Republic of Texas.
Scholars Strategy Network?
When the Spanish didn’t have enough Indian slaves to work in their mines, they brought in African slaves.
Yeah.....they were great guys.
If you go back a little further, those lands were populated by dinosaurs, but we don't live in those times either. We live in today's world and should worry about the current situation.
Dinosaur Lives Matter!
The winning issue! Most Americans on both sides of the isle want an end to illegal entry of foreigners into the U.S. Trump is right not the best of the best. Some add to nations productivity but for every $10,000 to the U.S. Economy, $ 24,000 is paid out from taxpayers. Can you say Greece?
Libs need to go fix Mexico so that we all want to move there.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.