Filling Kamala Harris’ U.S. Senate seat: Why aren’t Latinos at the front of the line?
I disagree with an icon of the Latino community, but don’t disparage her or her message.
By doing so, I am undoubtedly breaking 21st-century rules of trolling as a form of commentary, but I’m not going to crush labor leader and activist Dolores Huerta for promoting the cause of Black women.
The greatest living symbol of the United Farm Workers movement and one of the most celebrated Latinas in America, Huerta urged Gov. Gavin Newsom to appoint a Black woman to fill Kamala Harris’ seat in the U.S. Senate this week.
“Black women’s voices are especially needed at this time in history,” said the 90-year-old Huerta in a tweet shared by Women’s Foundation California.
“By doing this, Gov. Newsom, you will be taking a step to correct a terrible history of discrimination that Black women have suffered through the ages.”
There is no disputing Huerta’s message. But as the son of a Mexican woman who experienced ethnic bias in America and gender discrimination inside and outside her community, my alternative message is that the community of California Latinos deserves to be heard as well.
The point here isn’t that Latinos and Latinas should be considered at the expense of Black women. The point is that Latinos and Latinas have been ignored for generations in California and should be recognized for their contributions.
This has everything to do with opportunity and equity denied to Latinos in our state history. The stories of people descended from Mexican and Central American immigrants have been erased and diminished since Feb. 2, 1848, when Mexico ceded 55% of its territory – including California – to the United States after the Mexican-American War.
The discrimination experienced by “beaners” and “greasers” and “wetbacks” since then, the way our ancestral customs were bastardized and caricatured by the dominant culture of white people who flooded California during the Gold Rush, wreaked havoc on established communities of Mexico’s descendants in California.
Despite American pledges to honor property rights of Mexicans in California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, property was taken – by force or by “rule of law” – by white Americans who quickly found a group to look down upon after setting up shop in the new American West. Existing Mexican families lost their land, community stature, legacy wealth and honor. They lost their place in the world.
Devastation was visited upon Native American people, many of whom wed with Mexican folks, Spanish people, and former African slaves and who were living lives freed from rigid racial hierarchies established by Spanish conquerors in Mexico. That is, until the Americans arrived en masse.
Darker skinned people found some upward mobility in the American West until gringos showed up and established their racial order where was white was right.
A past marked by malice
Many source books tell these stories, my favorite being “Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America” by Gregory Rodriguez.
The “Californios,” the phrase for Californians who spoke Spanish, were ambivalent about the arrival of Americans initially, Rodriguez wrote. Some favored it, some didn’t. Some fought it, some tried to appease the new conquerors .
No matter. Californios of all stripes soon felt the wrath of new bosses who didn’t care about their culture, their stories, their properties, their contributions.
Why weren’t the “Californios” united? Because they were indelibly marked by the legacy of colonialism. For centuries before California became a state, dark-skinned people married into the families of light-skinned conquerors. People and property were taken through force and matrimony consecrated by the Catholic Church.
Once the Americans took over, the Californios faded into segregated communities of under-privileged people – unless you wanted to deny your roots and pretend to be Spanish.
Don’t laugh. I fell into that trap in my teen years when I first experienced the malice behind the slurs. Generations of our people have Anglicized their names or discouraged their children from speaking Spanish to simply live in peace.
For generations, our young people have been brutalized by police in major California cities. They were targeted in Los Angeles during the the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943. That’s when World War II era Marines and and sailors attacked young Mexican men dressed – as the Los Angeles Times put it – “in wide trousers pegged at the ankle and long coats.” Young Mexican men paid the price at the hands and fists of servicemen for “refusing to cede the sidewalk.”
And the LA Times of that day crowed at the spectacle of white sailors beating up young brown men who weren’t breaking any laws:
“Those gamin dandies, the zoot suiters, having learned a great moral lesson from servicemen, mostly sailors, who took over their instruction three days ago, are staying home nights.”
“Operation Wetback” in the 1950s remains the largest mass deportation in US history. In 1970, the largest demonstration of Latinos in American history at that point was violently put down by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The demonstration was peaceful and focused on the disproportionate number of Latino soldiers killed in the Vietnam War.
It was attended by families and small children, but was seen as a threat by the white establishment. The deputies were the enforcers of the rigid racial social order.
Where do we fit?
Like an echo from the end of Mexican-American War, the sanctity of Latino lives were not considered by authorities. Ruben Salazar, a pioneering Latino journalist, was killed Aug. 20, 1970. A deputy fired a tear gas canister into the building where Salazar sought refuge from the violence. His voice was silenced, the deputy faced no consequences for his callous disregard for life.
Sound familiar?
Proposition 187 in 1994 targeted the undocumented, but galvanized California against people who fit the profile of a “Mexican.” “Three Strikes” laws, gang task forces, English-only initiatives, and bigots like former Governor Pete Wilson have continued this onslaught of injustice.
Meanwhile, our triumphs have been erased from the history books. For example: Did you know that eight years before Brown vs. Board of Education, the first federal court to declare school segregation was unconstitutional was brought by a Mexican family in Orange County named Mendez?
It’s true. Mendez vs. Westminster was a landmark case in its own right in 1946. It ended segregation of schools in California. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Mendez family, which wanted its daughter to attend an all-white school in Westminster.
Perhaps if the 9th District had not ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, the case might have gone to the U.S. Supreme Court as Brown vs. Board of Education did for Black families in 1954? It’s a quirk of history that is too significant to have been forgotten, but it largely has been. Why?
One of the key passages of Rodriguez’s book describes how Mexicans did not fit and have not fit in the rigid racial order of the U.S . We are neither Black nor white, and if 2020 has taught us anything, its that America is still framed through a Black and white prism even though, in California, Latinos are nearly 40 percent of the state’s population.
Where do we fit? Too often we don’t. Too often our stories haven’t been told. Too often we’ve been relegated to the margins.
Huerta’s support of Black women, while well intended, is a reflection of how even our icons can help erase our stories.
What kind of stories? Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez recently launched the “Unseen Latinas” initiative to address the challenges faced by Latinas in California. As The Bee’s Kim Bojórquez wrote: “One report by the Hispanas Organized For Political Equality, for instance, shows California Latinas earn 42 cents for every dollar a white man makes.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has decimated Latino families.
So, why not the U.S. Senate?
Meanwhile, Latinos and Latinas actually could and would honor California by representing the state in the U.S. Senate.
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla is a leading candidate – perhaps the leading candidate – for the spot and is close to Newsom.
Padilla would be a worthy choice but some Latinas also deserve to be considered.
Hilda Solis has served in the state legislature, in Congress, she was secretary of Labor under Barack Obama and she is now on the Los Angeles County of Board of Supervisors. She knows government works at the local, state and federal level. She was an early supporter of President-elect Joe Biden.
State Sen. Maria Elena Durazo already built a distinguished career as a labor leader before becoming a leader in the California legislature.
And one name that doesn’t get mentioned enough: Former State Senate leader Kevin de León, who was the first Latino to helm the upper chamber in more than a century. He won many legislative victories on climate change, immigrants rights, gun control.
He ruffled feathers by challenging U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 2018, an election that now seems like a missed opportunity. Feinstein, at 87, has some calling for her resignation after a series of missteps in her former role as the ranking Democrat of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
De León is an interesting case study in how Latinos are sometimes perceived by the dominant culture in California. When he held his Senate swearing in at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2014, a mostly white Capitol press corps raised questions about its “extravagance” even though the event marked the occasion of the first Latino to hold the State Senate leadership since 1883.
Yes, it was a historic event. But then again, maybe his press critics thought it should have been held at a Mexican restaurant in Sacramento?
Left unsaid in the pointed coverage of de León’s event were the number of students who were in attendance and who witnessed the ascension to the highest levels of power of someone who looked like them. Such milestones for Latinos have been in short supply in California.
He also encountered a “how dare you” attitude from Feinstein supporters, who helped her duck real debates with de León.
He gets called a “firebrand” and arrogant for playing politics with his elbows out.
All that is missing from coverage of de León is the word “uppity.”
Maybe it’s just politics? Maybe it’s a double standard? Or maybe, implicitly, it’s still difficult for non-Latinos – and some Latinos – to see a de León, a Solis, a Durazo, in a position as vaunted as a U.S. senator?
That’s been an undeniable part of the history of California.
It seems fitting then that Newsom, the epitome of white privilege in California, will decide the fate of Harris’ U.S. Senate seat. Some things in California have changed little since 1848.
This story was originally published December 17, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
