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.
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Ben Railton is an Associate Professor of English at Fitchburg State University and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.
A comment from Hot Air:
“I keep telling myself that Trump is not a conservative.
But, he is apparently the only one willing and able to vocally take on the Left. He’s the only one actively working hard to get my vote.”
BLEAHHHH.
Agree with the comment. I don’t care what they call him but he’s the only one saying what needs to be said.
Funny how these English professors are weighing in about stuff that ought to be, at the least, the province of Mexican-American history. Is one liberal degree just as good as another?
Sure...Bennie, bring me another Corona - and don't forget the lime this time!
Yeah, basically worthless.
Ben Railton sucks azz.
I think Trump doesn’t really CARE if he is seen as a serious candidate, and so he gets to be the enfant terrible telling the emperor that he is naked. And so overall, a boon whether or not he makes it.
The writer completely ignores the hatred the Native Americans had against the Mexicans and sided with the Americans.
Yeah, Mexico lost much of her country because she wasn't governing it. Polk more or less rescued the lands he took.
If a government can't govern, the vacuum will be filled. And, of course, that principle applies to Washington DC, too.
Who is everybody talking about on every TV & Radio talk show, and how many articles are being written in publications about Trump? I guess they are hearing about Trump more than others.
As bad as those Yanks treated the Indians... it was paradise compared to the Mexican treatment.
Drop-off the author in Nuevo Laredo for a few weeks.
Add Kathryn Steinle to the good professors list of xenophiles
Heh. This guy should check out how the Mexicans (Spanish) treated the indians they stole the land from first.
There’s one big, overarching problem here that few mention often enough. The USA is arguably the most successful nation on earth and Mexico is in the lower half of any ranking of successful nations.
The old saying concerning Mexico: “So far from heaven, but so close to the United States of America” also illustrates this reality. So, many Mexicans and guilt-ridden, self-loathing whites spend a lot a time coming up with specious reasons why Mexico and Mexicans are entitled to anything the US has to offer and the US is eternally guilty and indebted to Mexico and all the Third World.
All self-serving and self-justifying nonsense.
Trump wasn’t complaining about Nexican-Americans, and he wasn’t complaining about legal immigrants. He was specifically complaining about the illegals. All of this discussions about legals is an intentional attempt to obfuscate.
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