Essays/Commentaries

                                Why Latinos?

Arturo Madrid

          Latin@s are a prime target of the Trump Administration’s assault on sectors of the U.S. population.  In his first term of office Trump focused his wrath on undocumented immigrants, whom he deemed criminal.  His pronouncements essentially conflated all Latinos as being immigrants of Mexican origin and criminals.  Antagonism to Latino immigrants has been particularly marked Trump’s second administration. ICE and the Border Patrol are now authorized by the U.S. Supreme Court to detain any Latin@ suspected of being undocumented based on their speech, dress and physical appearance.   What explains this assault on Latin@s, which is being carried out with the support of state and local law enforcement agencies and National Guard troops?

          Donald J. Trump signaled his animosity to Mexicans even as he announced his candidacy for President in 2015: "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. . . They're sending people that have lots of problems. . . they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists".  In 2016, during his presidential campaign, he publicly accused the judge presiding over fraud lawsuits against Trump University of being biased against him because the judge was “of Mexican heritage.” U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrant parents.  

          Stephen J. Miller, his principal advisor on immigration matters, is openly antagonistic to all persons of Mexican origin, an antipathy that dates to his high school days in Santa Monica, CA, as writer Jean Guerrero documents in her book, Hate Monger (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2021). Miller is reported to be the architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policies and actions, including the construction of the wall along the border, separating children from their families at the border, and empowering ICE to detain Latin@s, whatever their civic status.

White supremacists construct Latin@s as a threat to their imagined society, one allegedly composed of “heritage Americans;” that is, “Americans of European descent,” “people who embody an ‘Anglo-Protestant spirit,’” and who “have a tie to history and to the land” (The Atlantic, October 7, 2025).  The irony is that Latin@s have a primary claim to being “Heritage Americans.”  We are descendants of the original “Americans.” We are native to the Americas.  

 This animus against Latin@s has its basis in our biological hybridity, our cultural vitality, and especially on our electoral potential.  Latin@s are an essential part of the fabric of the multi-racial, multi-cultural society that the U.S. has become. Thus the resurgence of a vile narrative that holds that we do not belong.  It seeks to subvert our own narrative, which is that we have had a central role in the history and development of the United States and thereby have a legitimate claim to the rights and protections enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the United States.

“The fear and violence we are experiencing are the results of a president who is openly anti-Latino,” says Thomas Saenz, the president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Saenz further states that the Trump Administration seems “intent on eliminating the Latino community as an essential part of the country.”  Its policies have as their purpose to deport Latino immigrants not for their alleged criminality, but because they want to restrict the growth of the Latino population.   Those same policies also have as their intent to co-opt, marginalize, and/or silence Latin@s for fear that our electoral heft will increase and that our cultural impact will expand.

            Who Gets to Define American Identity?

Gerald E. Poyo

For decades, many right-wing writers and politicians have claimed this land as their own.  They resented and acted against the various civil rights movements dedicated to ensuring Native American, Black, Latino, and other communities of color received equal rights in the United States.  In recent years, national, state, and local leaders have not only fully embraced the hard right-wing, but legitimized as reasonable an unconscionable white racist Christian nationalist ideology that condemns multiculturalism as somehow un-American when the very essence of United States history is rooted in cultural diversity.

When the English arrived, they encountered Native Americans, the only peoples who could legitimately claim this land as their own.  Shortly, they brought slaves from Africa who became Americans. Then they purchased and took land from people of Spanish and French background with mixed heritages in Louisiana and the Southwest. Germans arrived, as did Jews, Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Middle Easterners and many others creating a clearly multicultural society.  Fearing their dominance challenged, Anglo Americans asserted their power creating the original American identity politics based on white supremacy.  During the second half of the twentieth-century, in response to repression and determined to secure their rights, peoples of color organized to reject white supremacist thought and policies offering an alternative and inclusive multicultural vision for this nation.

Immigrant cultures have, in their unique ways, always influenced the United States; integration was never linear or smooth and proceeded in different ways depending on group, community, and era. Immigrants from India today will not integrate into the United States as did Swedes in the 19^th Century. Mexican American culture offers a good example of the complexity of defining “American.”  The persistence of the Spanish language, bilingual format of Tejano radio stations, Tex-Mex food, Chicano literature, and countless other cultural hybrids illustrate that the Mexican American experience is fully American, but influenced historically within the context of Anglo white supremacist-imposed constraints.

Now, people of African, Latino, and Asian background constitute almost half the nation’s population, yet white supremacists continue to argue that this is their nation, which they claim the right to define.  In reality who has the right to define American identity?  Is white really more American than black?  Is someone of Irish background more American than another person of Salvadoran origin?  Is a naturalized immigrant from London more American than a Spanish-speaking person born in San Antonio whose family has been here since the eighteenth century?  Is a Christian more American than a Jew, Moslem, Hindu, or Buddhist?  If so, how is this justified?  Perhaps justification is not necessary when racial fear, desire for raw economic power, and access to military power are at play.  What we are seeing today is no longer just about immigration. Are ICE and the National Guard the new tool for reimposing white supremacy? Is this what MAGA means?

The Chaos has to Stop

Gilberto M. Hinojosa

ICE is breaking up families and tearing up the lives and work of people who have been in this country for years.  At times, ICE is deporting children from the only country and culture they have ever known.

That was the lament of Archbishop Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C. at a Mass prayed for all immigrants.  The reason for all this turmoil, he explained, is that they entered this country without proper documentation, in some cases many years ago.  The Gospel, he pointed out, presents another standard:  Who is my neighbor?  Who are we responsible for?

Even for economic reasons, all this chaos makes no sense.

Our country has needed – and continues to need – immigrant workers for a variety of jobs:  laborers in the farm fields, construction workers, cooks and waiters in restaurants, housekeepers in homes and hotels, attendants in nursing homes, daycare workers, and nurses in clinics.

All these immigrants, men and women, rent or buy homes, buy clothes and groceries, and some purchase cars.  They all pay taxes either directly or indirectly.  They abide by the laws of this land and educate their children.

Little by little, they learn English and figure out the rules at their workplace.  Some bring a variety of skills and apply them to their new homeland.  Others master the expertise needed in their new occupations.

They came to this country because we needed them, leaving behind extended families they loved and friends they knew and cherished.  They left their societies and cultures because they could not make a living there or, in some cases, feared for their lives because of political or criminal violence.

They are here, starting new lives.  They work very hard, at times taking jobs that are so backbreaking or so difficult that Americans cannot handle or do not want.  These newcomers take those jobs because they want economic and family stability.

Simply put, they are good citizens without citizenship. 

ICE is destroying their lives – and our society and economy.  It just does not make sense.

And it is inhumane.  It also goes against our country’s religious traditions.  In the Old (Hebrew) Testament, God reminded the Israelites:  Remember, when you came into this land, you also were a stranger, an immigrant.  In the New (Christian) Testament, Jesus warned that when you mistreat the helpless, you mistreat him.  They cannot be exploited or disposed.

In his new Exhortation, Pope Leo XIV admonished us that we cannot separate faith from caring for the poor and the immigrant.

For our peace and prosperity and for the love of God, this ICE turmoil has to stop!

San Antonio ExpressNews

Ten million Texans displaced by proposed redistricting plan

by

Al Kauffman

The proposed  redistricting plan before the Texas Legislature will move 10,000,000 Texans out of their congressional districts only to satisfy Republican needs for more districts. The plan violates every rule of fair redistricting that state leaders have touted as they have defended discriminatory redistricting plans for the last 25 years. The plan is a cynical attempt to exploit the majority Republicans hold in the Texas legislature and complete control in the Texas leadership. The plan is an effort to offset the increasing strength of Latino and African American have in population and voting roles by using every technique inS the gerrymanders’ bag of tricks.

Cracking and packing disfavored groups of voters and pairing disfavored office holders are classic methods of reducing the voting strength of those groups gerrymanderers wish to disenfranchise. The plan for redistricting Texas’s 38 congressional districts uses these old techniques and new techniques using data on every home in Texas. And to add insult to injury, President Trump plans to exclude non-citizens from the census which will lead to significant losses in Latino and Democratic representation.

An example I use in my voting rights class explains this. Assume there are 12 persons in a group, 8 R’s and 4 D’s; and that you want to divide them into 4 groups of 3 persons each. One would expect that D’s, one-third of the total, would be a majority in one or two of the four districts. But if R’s were in charge, they could draw 4 districts of 2R’s and 1D each and D’s would have no districts. This is called cracking-the R’s have cracked the D population into 4 districts with one D in each. But if D’s were in charge, they could draw 2 districts of 3R’s each and two districts of 2D’s and 1R each. So D’s would be a majority in 2 of the 4 districts. D’s have packed the R’s into 2 districts and minimized their voting power.

Now suppose that only citizens of voting age are counted in the districting scheme. Due to the younger age and other factors in the Latino population, this would significantly reduce the proportion of persons counted in redistricting. So our 12 person group will now be 11- 8 R’s and 3D’s making it much easier for R’s to crack the minimal D population.

The proposed Republican plan for redistricting Texas cracks the Latino and African American and Democratic populations in some areas and packs them in other areas. And then it pairs two highly regarded Democratic congress members into one district near Austin and cracks historic African American districts in Houston and Dallas and weakens Latino districts in South Texas.

In fact, almost all the growth in Texas population over the last decades has been Latino, and the vanishing white Anglo group has resorted to a slew of techniques to maintain control. Since 2020, Texas has added 2,000,000 people of color and 90,000 whites.

The 10,000,000 Texans who are being moved out of their districts did not ask for this redistricting. They are inconvenienced and treated as pawns in a national partisan battle. We Texans can do better.

 

Saturday Morning Covfefe: 5 Things with Olivia

Brewing truth with a double shot of “you can’t make this up

Olivia de Troye. commentary

Surviving the ICEage: Commentaries to Awaken by Gerald E. Poyo

6/20/25- Headline: “Texas Legislature and Governor Approve Creation of Five Additional GOP Congressional Seats at Trump’s Behest.”   The State of Texas is leading the way making a realty of Trump’s authoritarian vision for the United States.  What does this mean?  This is the political side of an already advanced militarization of federal policy sanctioned by the Supreme Court of the United States.  In using National Guard and the US military to enforce domestic policy under the pretext of national emergencies, Trump has created a mechanism for imposing his arbitrary and repressive rule.  But to maintain this path, Trump must hold Congress in 2026. Polls are showing that free and fair elections will not result in returning a Republican majority to the House of Representatives, and perhaps even in the Senate.  Not willing to abide such a loss, Trump convinced Texas to pack the House with five more Republican seats.  Without the integrity to defend democratic tradition or process, Texas Republicans happily collaborated with Trump’s authoritarian pretenses which if successful will consolidate after 2026.  Other Republican states are likely to follow the Texas lead with a goal of effectively establishing United States as a ONE-PARTY STATE, similar to Russia.  American democracy is under assault in many ways and for many reasons that we will address in coming commentaries.

Surviving the ICEage: Commentaries to Awaken by Gerald E. Poyo

6/22/25. Headline: Trump Again Betrays Latino Communities — This Time Ripping Away Support for Hispanic Serving Institutions.  In the 1990s, the federal government began providing financial resources for underfunded colleges and universities where most Latinos have historically attended. In central Texas this included St. Mary’s University, Our Lady of the Lake University, University of the Incarnate Word and even public institutions like University of Texas at San Antonio.  Hispanic Serving Institutions like these have provided excellent higher education possibilities and opportunities especially for Mexican Americans, but their resources are now being cut.  After many years of considerable progress, reduced funding for these Hispanic-serving institutions and cutbacks in federal loan programs for students are now threatening Latino access to higher education which has always been relatively low in comparison to other groups in the United States. This not only threatens Hispanic economic possibilities and mobility but is another example of Trump’s assault on American democracy, which requires an educated population to survive.  Latinos, take heed!

 Surviving the ICEage: Commentaries to Awaken by Gerald E. Poyo

8/26/25.  Headline: “The VISIBLE ACT is a proposed legislation aimed at enhancing visibility and accountability.”  Senators Alex Padilla (CA) and Cory Booker (NJ) are proposing legislation to prohibit federal, state, and local immigration enforcement officers from covering their faces during their interactions with the public. In addition, agents’ name, badge, and agency must be fully displayed.  Designed to protect the public from abuse, reduce intimidation, and build public trust for law enforcement, the proposed legislation also responds to growing evidence that criminals are impersonating immigration officials.  No other law enforcement officials in the nation carry out their duties with facemasks and the government’s argument that they are merely protecting their agents is questionable.  Why not issue face masks to local police, national guard, and the Marines, for that matter?  There is likely a more ominous reason.  Perhaps these agents are not what or who they seem.  Masks and secrecy give rise to all kinds of suspicions in this time of fearmongering and authoritarianism.  Keep alert!