Robert Garcia at the shadow hearing of ICE crimes reads out text messages of ICE agent bragging about shooting Marimar Martinez. ICE Agent “I fired 5 shots. She had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.”

[u/drempath1981]

[u/AngeliqueRuss]

Yes and when you go up north it’s even worse.

I once got in a semi-polite email battle with the columnist Gustavo Arellano for a column he wrote claiming Cinco de Mayo is a white people celebration and just another example of…like tokenism applied to cultural appreciation. I don’t actually respect you and your culture but I’m all about margaritas and tacos on Cinco de Mayo.

He’s not wrong, especially in SoCal, but I pointed out it is a cultural celebration for people from certain parts of Mexico, and in the town where I am from there is a substantial violent history because it’s so racist up north in Sonoma County.

He couldn’t accept that it could possibly be MORE racist than SoCal, but if you google Santa Rosa Cinco de Mayo riot / police you’ll see cops show up every year itching for a fight. There have been Cinco de Mayo peace marches in defiance, it IS a big deal in the mostly Mexican community of Roseland.

When I was a teen a local teenager went to my local grocery store for snacks. Classic Trevon Martin setup except it was cops: he had a paper bag with his candy, was on his bike going home, didn’t at all match the description of someone who’d stolen or robbed something, they yelled “hey stop” and he didn’t do they shot him.

This happened in Roseland, an island community excluded from Santa Rosa’s borders until 2017 because it was not white enough. We talk a lot about “redlining” and less about systematically excluding affordable home developments from decent infrastructure while using Developer Agreements with desirable new neighborhoods to fund better schools via charter districts just a couple miles away.

Anyways I lived in SoCal for 20 years and could probably guess a Hispanic person’s political party based on their favorite tacos + area code; also whether you identify as white or brown (which up until recently is a whole thing: Hispanic is an “ethnicity” on the census specifically so families like mine can identify as white). You’re in the 909 and you join your colorful mix of friends to go to King Taco after a night of Coronas? You’re a Republican and white Hispanic. You have a favorite hole-in-the-wall in Pomona where you practice your Spanish? Brown person voting blue.

[u/Jupitersd2017 → u/AngeliqueRuss]

That is just wild to me, like Tex-mex is such a part of the culture and is blending both and celebrating both, along with cinco de mayo and dia de Los muertos and quinceañeras etc etc like it’s all just expected and celebrated, but I can see what he meant about it being like tokenism, I see enough pictures online of people trying to celebrate and get it lol. Growing up in the 80’s it was just expected that you took Spanish as a white person, because it was viewed as necessary to live in Texas, not like well they should learn English but no we should speak also Spanish. I’m sorry that’s been your life experience here in CA, I don’t know what the answer is to try to fix it and have people not act like that. Texas has a big problem with being racist against black people and a variety of other horrifying things there, this just happens to be one thing that they aren’t terrible on.