Latinos under attack in the United States

El Paso - Mario Tama/Getty Images 

This Is What Latinos Think Everyone Got Wrong About El Paso

A well-meaning desire to erase the shooter and his hateful ideology has instead erased the victims and their community.

By Adrian Carrasquillo*

As a reporter, I’ve talked to immigration activists for the better part of a decade. They don’t often cry, at least not in front of me.

But all day on Sunday, the day after the shooting in El Paso, hardened advocates became emotional while explaining what it’s like to live in the United States after a killer drove 10 hours to kill Mexicans, Latinos and immigrants. The next day I still felt restless after a conversation with a friend. She had been crying because her husband overheard white men at the community pool remarking that while they didn’t agree with the killings — how magnanimous — they, too, didn’t want white people to be “wiped out” and for Hispanics to “take over.”

Where was this said? The deeply Republican city of Los Angeles, of course.

“He openly was discussing this like it was sports talk,” she told me, furious. “After 20 people are dead.”

The news media’s approach to its coverage of the El Paso shooting has obscured what made it uniquely horrifying for the Latino community. From the moment the shots were fired, this was a trend story: Another mass shooting, so let’s restart our debates about gun control and mental illness, maybe pull up some video game b-roll. And after so many shootings in recent years, journalists have decided it’s wrong to give too much attention to the shooter, so we downplayed his name and face, his bizarre and hateful manifesto.

But the media’s desire to erase the shooter and his ideology ended up erasing his victims and their community, too. While the news media successfully portrayed this shooting as part of a national epidemic of mass killings, we failed to accurately convey how this one was different. The visceral emotions of the Latinos I spoke with should have been—and should still be—front and center.

After years of covering immigration, I thought I understood how immigrants felt, because of our similar backgrounds. But I didn’t, not really. I’m Puerto Rican and Ecuadorian and from New York. Like many Hispanics, I’ve known undocumented people, but while I could empathize with immigrants going through hardship, that’s not the same as sharing their experience.

This killer expressly traveled to a city filled with Mexicans and immigrants. This is new territory. The El Paso shooting isn’t just a sad moment that will pass, but the culmination of an anti-immigrant four decades in politics that ratcheted up in the 1990s and 2000s and has become only louder, emboldened and unchecked by American leaders, led by the president but certainly not just by him.

Of the 49 victims three years ago at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, 90 percent were Latino. Almost half were Puerto Rican. Others were Colombians, Mexicans and Dominicans. But what makes El Paso different is that people were targeted, not by someone pledging themselves to ISIS, but to white supremacy.

“Now Hispanic Americans have been targeted, some who are immigrants, and all who have limited political power,” I wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “That’s what’s going on. And people are terrified.”

Then the messages starting coming in.

I received more than 160 private messages on Twitter along with some emails and texts from people who told me they didn’t have a safe space to share these stories.

They were from immigrants and people born in this country just like me. They were from older people scared for their children and grandchildren, but also from teenagers, heartbreakingly young teens of 16 and 17, who shouldn’t have to worry that someone is going to tell them to “go back to Mexico” and threaten to attack them while walking their dog if they don’t cross the street now. They were from people in red states and blue states, the united states of hating immigrants and people who just look like they might be. They were from biracial people, but also from white people who explained that their sister had married a Latino man and that means they have two Latina nieces, or a grandson, and they’re scared of the ways their neighbors might try to hurt them — with words they won’t forget or violence that could take them away forever.

A Latina in a predominantly Hispanic border city “very much like El Paso” told me she has a new job, overseeing a team of mostly Hispanic staff, with her name on the door — something to really be proud of. But instead she’s terrified, she said, because the office is marketed toward Latinos and that means she feels like a target.

A Dreamer in Texas told me he was terrified of taking his son to stores or crowded places, and said he warned his parents not to speak Spanish in public. A first-generation Salvadoran man with a wife who is white said they just had a baby boy four weeks ago. He said he has told her he hopes the baby doesn’t have dark skin.

A white man said his Latina wife from the Rio Grande Valley broke down after reading the shooter’s manifesto. She told him she’s sorry if their future kids are targets because of her.

There were people who said they wish they didn’t have an accent so they could pass as white, and others who said they are ashamed to be relieved they can pass as white. “We’re not fine,” a resident of a border town wrote to me.

And then the process started all over again. A massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at seven food processing plants in Morton, Mississippi, led to the arrests of 680 undocumented workers, a record. Children cried outside the gates for their parents. Wives came to the scene to say goodbye to their husbands. It was a new method for separating families, but with the same result.

At first I didn’t watch the video of 11-year-old Magdalena Gomez Gregorio tearfully begging the government to release her father every time it popped up online, because while as a journalist I understand the news value of these images to show the human cost of Trump’s immigration policy, I’ve personally found it hard to continue looking at haunting images like it. I remember little Jakelin, 7, who died of dehydration in U.S. custody last year, or Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, face down in the Rio Grande in June, their tragedy transformed into a small part of the perpetual motion machine of online content. But I watched the video as I wrote this paragraph, of her asking the government to “please show some heart,” between sobs, while adding that her father is not a criminal.

Like her, many Hispanics are worried. They live in parts of the South where there aren’t many Latinos, but also in majority-Hispanic areas where the actions of an outsider coming to a border town to kill means the cocoon of community doesn’t present the sense of protection it once did. But even in this dark moment there are hopeful signs.

The Latino community in the United States is not monolithic. At most, we have a shared language that not all speak. But I’ve seen a growing awareness of people sticking together online, as people check on one another on Instagram, in person and on the phone. There is fear, but people are also resolute that things will get better. And some wanted to make clear to me that while they’re well aware of how deeply awful this moment is, they still stand in defiance of those who would instill fear.

“I am done being terrorized,” one young man wrote to me. “My stepdad didn’t march and organize in the Chicano movement for our generation to live in fear.”

And while I think the news media should do better to contextualize the El Paso attack as a toxic brew of American gun culture and hatred of Latinos, there has been a lot of good coverage, too. Univision preempted its programming with a prime-time special by Jorge Ramos and Patricia Janiot titled “Hispanics in the Crosshairs,” and Telemundo’s José Díaz-Balart interviewed El Paso victims from the hospital, sharing Spanish-language texts exchanged between a mother and her daughter. Cassandra Jaramillo and Alfredo Corchado of the Dallas Morning News filed big-hearted stories from El Paso that centered on local heroes and spotlighted the community’s pain, and the Los Angeles Times reporters Esmeralda Bermudez, Paloma Esquivel and Cindy Carcamo elevated the voices of Latino residents and grappled with the Trump factor. CNN’s Nicole Chavez covered how “Walmart united Americans and Mexicans in El Paso for decades” and the network’s Nick Valencia convened a round table of Hispanics from El Paso about “The Impact of Trump’s Rhetoric on Hispanic Americans.” For the “CBS Evening News,” Manuel Bojorquez spoke to a roundtable of El Paso Latinos, one of whom said Trump “has been poisoning so many people with his words and targeting us Latinos when all we do is work.”

I believe in and am still awed by the power of journalism, of documenting people’s stories so better-informed citizens can rally around their neighbors and cast out the ignorance that led to this shameful stain on our country’s history. As one person, who came to the country legally at the age of 19, wrote to me, the pain is relatively recent, but there is an antidote.

“It is really the last few months that I feel not wanted by my fellow Americans and it hurts,” she wrote. “It hurts because we contribute to the economy, to the food and the culture. I know the vast majority of Americans do not feel this way about us, but we will need you to speak up.”

Adrian Carrasquillo is a national political reporter covering 2020 and Latino issues who has written for NBC News, BuzzFeed, and The New Republic.

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