COMMENTARY The upcoming Día de la Raza observance begs the question: do Latinos aspire to be part of the vital diversity that defines America, or of the vulgar exclusivity that's undermining it?
Soon after then-presidential candidate Donald Trump delivered his Hitleresque warning in 2023 that non-white immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country,” I issued my own to Latinos who prefer to consider themselves white:
“Don’t kid yourself,” I wrote in this column. “Trump’s talking about you, too.”
And, unfortunately, I was right.
Turns out you can look as gringo white as I do, but President Trump’s immigration police will still come after you if your name is Gonzalez or Castillo or Ruiz.
Your blood is still toxic.
Now that Latinos realize that — after they’ve watched law-abiding family and friends and fiancés get hauled into squalid migrant detention centers and deported — polls show they’re turning away from Trump and the Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections as fast and furiously as they fled former President Joe Biden and the Democrats in the 2024 general election.
READ MORE: Merry Christmas from Miami — the 'poisoned blood' capital of America!
I understood their shift two years ago — the inflation Biden dismissed was dealing Latinos an inordinately heavy economic blow — and I certainly get their Trumpista buyer’s remorse now.
But as we approach Oct. 12, and what that day means for American identity, I worry about something larger and more existential than political trends when it comes to this country’s largest minority.
And it boils down to this question: Do Latinos aspire to be part of the proud diversity that defines America — or of the racial, ethnic and religious exclusivity that’s undermining America today?
Next Monday, Oct. 12, Americans will likely again be at each other’s throats about whether to call our national “discovery” observance Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day.
I actually think the Latin American compromise gets it right by calling it Día de la Raza, or Day of the Race — in this case, the mixed mestizo race. It’s an acknowledgment that the New World spawned after 1492 is a hallowed hybrid of this hemisphere’s Native American founding, European conquest, African abduction and Asian and Oceanic immigration.
When Trump called migrants “poisonous” to American blood, too many Latinos told themselves: He’s talking about “other,” non-white Latinos.
Día de la Raza may as well be a Spanish translation of America’s Latin motto E Pluribus Unum — Out of Many, One — that graces every U.S. dollar bill.
Yet I wonder if the American community that celebrates Día de la Raza still gets that.
Nordic Christians
I say that because, when Trump effectively called Latinos “poisonous” to America’s bloodstream three years ago, I watched too large a portion of that community tell themselves:
He’s not talking about me. He’s talking about those “other,” non-white Latinos.
No, he was referring to you and to every other person who doesn’t fit his MAGA ideal of the Nordic Christian Americans he publicly wishes more immigrants resembled.
That would be the Americans Trump’s Vice President, JD Vance, reverentially alluded to last year when he declared that folks whose white ancestors arrived here before the Civil War “have a hell of a lot more claim over America” than anyone whose more exotic forebears came later.
As an encore last week, Vance said Black Democratic Florida Senate candidate Angie Nixon “should get the hell out of” America and “doesn’t belong here” because of what he called her “socialist” views. It wasn’t an explicitly racial attack, but it was hard not to hear the echo of who MAGA thinks has a “claim over America.”
The Vance vomit is a monstrously anti-American vision of America — a country whose core reason for existing is its liberating break with the Old World belief that your birth determines your worth. And I say that as someone whose first English ancestors settled here in 1665 — a century before Vance’s did, which means by his perverse calculation I’m the better, purer American.
It also means I’m not Latino, and I’m of course not presuming to speak for Latinos. I am, however, more than a little invested in Latinos because they include my wife, children and grandchildren.
More important, I’m invested in them because I’m an American.
I’m invested in Latinos taking that Día de la Raza ethos seriously — more seriously than so many of them took it when, confronted with Trump’s eugenics menace, they chose to ride the blanco, or white, bandwagon rather than defend their bravo, or excellent, ancestry.
An emphatically American ancestry that I’ll be celebrating, as well as many others, on Oct. 12.
