The Rev. Tommy Vallejos is over at The Tennessean explaining why he and other Latinos voted for Trump — “I am a Latino man and I am not a racist. Here are the reasons I voted for Trump.”
He opens with:
One of the most insulting narratives coming out of this year’s presidential elections is that Latinos who voted for President Donald Trump are racists.
As someone who served our country in the Armed Forces, an American of Mexican roots, who proudly cast my vote for President-elect Donald Trump, I condemn this narrative with every fiber of my being.
I voted for President-Elect Donald Trump because these last few years under the current administration have been a disaster on many levels.
There’s a thing about the accusations of racism that's getting a little flattened here. Yes, some people are insinuating that Trump-voting Latinos are racist because they didn’t vote for a Black woman. But a lot more people are pissed that Trump-voting Latinos voted for an administration that will hurt all people of color, that Trump-voting Latinos abandoned other minorities. I am not in a position to say one way or another that that’s true. But that second claim seems to be where the real hurt and anger lies, and that’s not addressed by the Rev. Vallejos, for whatever reason.
Tennessean opinion editor David Plazas also jumps into the fray, writing: “This frankly does not surprise me. As a Latino male, a journalist and writer of The Tennessean's Latino Tennessee Voices newsletter, I follow these trends closely. I wrote two columns in the last two months calling on the Harris campaign not to take Latino votes for granted and not to browbeat Black and brown voters.”
Plazas at least mentions the real issue — let’s call it the source of confusion — for many people trying to understand why any Latino person would vote for Trump: “Later, a disagreeable troll replied this way: ‘You might not be a monolith. But the plans Trump has for you and your people will be distributed equally. You'll deserve everything you get.’”
Listen, I get that when someone is being an asshole in the way this troll is, you don’t have any reason to address his point. But I wish Plazas had. Trump has said that he plans to deport 15 to 20 million people. There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country. Where are the other 4 to 9 million people coming from? One clue is that Trump wants to end birthright citizenship.
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I know that American history is a bummer, and that we’re not allowed to learn any lessons based on the past behavior of the U.S. government, lest white kids feel bad. But America certainly will round up U.S. citizens and send them to Mexico by the thousands. There was “repatriation” in the 1930s and 1940s, which led to California apologizing in 2012 to the hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens (and their families) who were illegally sent to Mexico. Then there was the time America decided to deport Latinos while also being blatantly, bracingly racist: "Operation Wetback," which, again, caught up U.S. citizens. And people die when the United States gets freaked out about Latinos. Who are all these friends all scattered like dry leaves? They were people being shipped to Mexico, one of whom wasn’t even Mexican!
And again, sorry to be such a downer, but it doesn’t even matter what kinds of promises you think you have from the U.S. government about how you’ll be treated. Ask Japanese American citizens who had their civil rights violated when they were put in camps during World War II. Or ask Native Americans how many treaties the United States made with them that the country actually honored. Hell, drive down to Chattanooga and ask someone from the Cherokee tribal government. Oh, wait, right. You can’t do that because they don’t have Chattanooga anymore, even though America promised them and everyone else living on this side of the mountains that we wouldn’t come here.
Shoot, I’ve been living under the false belief that I’m a full and equal citizen to anyone else born here, and it turns out I don’t have the freedom to avail myself of all the health care I might need. Apparently, as of Election Day, I don’t even get a say in who I have sex with. (Oof, that’s a thing I wish weren't happening.) I get that looking America straight-on can be painful, but you can’t protect yourself if you don’t understand what you’re dealing with.
Y’all have been sold America as a war movie. We’re battling “invaders” from the south. We’re having wars on crime, drugs, poverty, et cetera. Our ways of life are under threat all the time. Cue “Run Through the Jungle,” because we need to be ready to be heroes at any moment.
But really, America is a horror movie: Someone accidentally digs up our ancient evil (or worse, lets it loose on purpose), and the mob goes into its predicable frenzy. Homes and businesses are burned. People are shot and hanged. Law enforcement is mysteriously absent. And then in the wake of the violence, once all the damage is done, members of the mob are shocked and confused and embarrassed, but never sorry enough to repent or to do what must be done to keep the ancient evil contained.
And like a horror movie, there isn’t any morality to who the victims are. Leatherface carves up anyone who gets in front of his chainsaw. Freddy gets you just because you fell asleep. When America gets to America-ing, all you can do is get out of its way and hide. And even then, you might still get caught up in it.
Since Tuesday I've trying to put a name to this monster that lives in the heart of our nation. Is it racism? Sexism? I mean, white women voted for Trump. Vallejos points out that he’s not a racist. But racism and sexism are different facets of the same thing: All of us are human beings, but not all of us are recognized as people. And by "people," I mean independent political actors with a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The human beings who are most easily recognizable as people in this country are white men. That’s baked into the founding documents in which “all men are created equal” — but most Black men were still only three-fifths a man, and definitely not a legal person. And even then, not all white men were a part of “all men.” Really, you needed to be a landowner. And of English-descent.
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Gradually, our notions of who a person is have expanded — first to include Germans and Swedes (look it up, Ben Franklin was repulsed by how not-white they were), then Irish men and other European men, then white women, then slowly, everyone else. But that habit — dare I say, pleasure — of being a person among non-people? This country doesn’t let go of it easily. And the personhood of everyone who isn’t a white man is constantly open to question.
You can work non-people like dogs. You can set a non-person on the task of cleaning your house and feeding your children, and whether she likes doing it doesn’t have to enter the equation. You don’t need to care if a non-person drowns in the Rio Grande or dies of thirst in the desert. If non-people are rounded up and sent to Mexico, well, look at the rest of us! We’re all people here, and our being here after the purge of the non-people proves it.
And, sure, maybe you think you’re white. Latinos can be white. Hell, Latinos like Nick Fuentes, Enrique Tarrio and Mauricio Garcia are well-known white supremacists. But that’s not how it works when the monster is loose. White people will point their fingers at other white people and say, “They’re not people like us!” And then, just like that, you go from being white to being the target of white people.
So the reason many of us are confused about why Latinos would vote for Trump is because of that frenzied evil that so often shamefully overcomes white people in America when we let loose our racism. When white people act on our worst racist impulses — like deciding that non-white people don’t belong here, or that some people here are "vermin," or that everyone from a certain place or background is a criminal and a rapist — we enact terrible violence on our neighbors. People get hurt. People get killed. And it is never only the “right” people. When the beast is feeding, it eats everything it can reach. Including you. Including me.
The question at the heart of America is whether we’re going to be a diverse country, full of all kinds of people, that is committed to fulfilling the promise of America — that we can self-govern, that all people should be liberated, and that we can support the happiness of others even if it’s not how we ourselves would choose to be happy. Or if we’re going to be a violent death cult of individual Molochs, throwing everyone into our open maws, luxuriating in the suffering of our neighbors under the justification that they don’t belong here, stealing the lives of the people we disagree with until, like Erysichthon, we consume even ourselves.
It seems impossible that anyone would choose the latter. I mean, I assume the main reason white people want to get rid of DEI and ban books from libraries and get rid of African American studies is because the only way to get more white people into the death cult is to get them initiated and reaping the benefits of it before they realize what the cost is. But even if you hide American history, it’s still here. People can tell you what happened to their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents.
Man, I don’t know. I just don’t get it. Trump is going to target Latinos. How are this many Latinos sure he doesn’t mean them? How do you look at American history and think, “Oh, if they let the beast loose on Latinos, we’ll be safe?”
