Sen. Alex Padilla's crime? Being Mexican in MAGA America

Gustavo Arellano, Tribune News Service

When US Senator Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from a news conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, it was almost as if President Donald Trump's most well-worn talking point came to life: A bad hombre tried to go after a white American. 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 claim was in keeping with Noem's pronouncements this week. On Tuesday, she accused Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum of encouraging violent protests in L.A. when the president actually called for calm.)

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 "bad" and 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 neighbour 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.

The echoes of that era continue to reverberate in MAGAland. It's why Trump went on social media to describe L.A. as a city besieged by a "Migrant Invasion" when people began to rally against all the immigration raids that kicked off last week and led to his draconian deployment of the National Guard and Marines to L.A. as if we were Fallouja in the Iraq war. It's what led the White House's Instagram account on Wednesday to share the image of a stern-looking Uncle Sam putting up a poster stating "Help your country ... and yourself" above the slogan "Report All Foreign Invaders" and a telephone number for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

It's what led US Atty. Bill Essayli to post a photo on his official social media account of SEIU California President David Huerta roughed up and in handcuffs after he was arrested for allegedly blocking the path of ICE agents trying to serve a search warrant on a factory in the Garment District.

It's why Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called in the National Guard before planned protests in San Antonio, one of the cradles of Latino political power in the United States and the home of the Alamo. It's why there are reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants to rename a naval ship honoring Chicano legend Cesar Chavez and has announced that the only U.S. military base named after a Latino, Ft. Cavazos in Texas, will drop its name.

And it's what's driving all the rabid responses to activists waving the Mexican flag. Vice President JD Vance described protesters as "insurrectionists carrying foreign flags" on social media. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — Trump's longtime anti-immigrant Iago — described L.A. as "occupied territory." The president slimed protesters as "animals" and "foreign enemies." In an address to Army soldiers prescreened for looks and loyalty at Ft. Bragg in North Carolina this week, he vowed, "The only flag that will wave triumphant over the city of Los Angeles is the American flag."

The undue obsession with a piece of red, green and white cloth betrays this deep-rooted fear by Americans that we Mexicans are fundamentally invaders.

And to some, that idea sure seems to be true. Latinos are now the largest minority group in the U.S., a plurality in California and nearly a majority in L.A. and L.A. County — and Mexicans make up the largest segment of all those populations by far. The truth of this demographic Reconquista, as I've been writing for a quarter of a century, is far more mundane.

The so-called invading force of my generation assimilated to the point where our kids are named Brandon and Ashley in all sorts of spellings. The young adults and teenagers on the street wrapping themselves in the Mexican flag right now are chanting against ICE in English and blasting Kendrick Lamar's "Not Like Us." More than a few of the National Guard troops, police officers and Homeland Security officers those young Latino activists were heckling have Latino surnames on their uniforms, when they show any identification at all. Hell, enough Mexican Americans voted for Trump that they arguably swung the election to him.