A Window Into Intra-Latino Politics
Dissecting Michelle Vallejo's new campaign ad
Today’s topic: Michelle Vallejo’s recent campaign ad, which draws a line in the sand between her and her Republican opponent Monica de la Cruz. They’re in a fierce contest to represent Texas District #15—which stretches from the San Antonio suburbs to the north, to the border towns of McAllen and Edinburg to the south—in the U.S. Congress. What’s striking to me about this ad is how it cleaves Latino identity—or, more precisely, Mexican American identity—in two: insiders and outsiders, those who stand with workers and those who ally themselves with the rich, those who work the land and those who exploit them. Here, watch the ad before reading on:
This is not the only example of the ethnic, racial, and class politics dividing Latinos today. We heard it in the L.A. City Council meeting, and we hear it in debates about whether Latinos are “people of color” or not, or whether we can be divided into two groups of Latinos—white Latinos and Black Latinos. Such intra-Latino tensions have been a part of our communities for more than a century. The only thing that’s different today is that they’re playing out on a national stage, for all Americans—both Latinos and non-Latinos—to see.
I’m still not convinced that all non-Latinos want to learn about these difficult-to-absorb nuances. As I’ve said before, I often think that non-Latinos only want to know whether we’ll vote for Democrats or Republicans, and then leave it at that. But in my opinion, as the Latino population grows, as we continue to play a larger role in U.S. politics, these nuances will be harder and harder to ignore. So, if you’re learning about them just now, welcome to an ongoing conversation. And buckle up, because it’s a wild roller-coaster of a ride that won’t come to a halt anytime soon.
Michelle Vallejo begins the ad by saying, “Dime con quien andas y te diré quien eres.” There’s a translation at the bottom of the screen that says, “tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are.” It’s an old saying, the meaning of which is pretty obvious. You can tell a lot about a person based on who they associate with.
The first thing I thought of when I heard Vallejo saying this was David Gutiérrez’s classic book Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. The saying that opens her ad is the same one as the epigraph in Gutiérrez’s book, although he translates it slightly differently: “Tell me with whom you walk and I will tell you who you are.” Same meaning. (And thanks, Michelle Vallejo, for causing me to peruse this gem of a book for the first time in a couple years). But beyond the epigraph, it turns out that Walls and Mirrors is a good lens through which to view Vallejo’s ad, because it tells the long history of intra-Mexican American tensions, especially with respect to the issue of immigration.
The publication of Walls and Mirrors in 1995 was impeccably timed. It came out soon after California voters passed Proposition 187, an anti-immigrant bill that would have denied undocumented immigrants access to public schools, health care, and other benefits. And it passed with a significant percentage of Latino support. So the year after the voter ballot initiative, you had a history of the divergent views of Mexican Americans that stretched all the way back to the nineteenth century. Gutiérrez’s main argument is that Mexican American ethnic and political identity has been shaped by how Mexican Americans have seen and related to Mexican immigrants.
In the Introduction, Gutiérrez writes, “for nearly a century”—remember, he was writing in the 1990s—“the more or less constant presence of large numbers of Mexican immigrants in Mexican American communities has forced Mexican Americans to come to daily decisions about who they are—politically, socially, culturally—in comparison to more recent immigrants from Mexico.”
He observes this dynamic within his own family:
I often heard my relatives complain about lenient immigration policies even though virtually every one of them had parents or grandparents who had emigrated to the United States from Mexico. My family griped about many different aspects of immigration, but their most common complaints were that Mexican wetbacks or illegals, as they often called them, were displacing Mexican American workers, depressing wages, and undermining union-organizing efforts. More important, from their point of view, the mass immigration of so-called backward, un-Americanized illegal aliens reinforced the negative stereotypes Anglo Americans held about all Mexicans, regardless of citizenship status, including those, like my family, who had lived in the United States for many generations.
This is also important:
… the immigration issue has always represented much more than merely establishing a border policy with Mexico. Forced virtually every day to deal with the both the [sic] positive and negative effects of immigration while struggling to win basic civil rights for their constituents, such activists have had to come to some fundamental decisions about just who their constituents are. Feeling the conflicting pressures exerted by by their cultural affinities on the one hand and their desire to achieve at least functional political and social integration as American citizens on the other, Mexican American activists often found themselves in an ambiguous moral and existential borderland in which questions of political and cultural identity were muddled in ways most Americans have never had to consider.
Brilliant. Gutiérrez’s words ring as true today as they did almost thirty years ago, and they show how Michelle Vallejo is tapping into a history of intra-ethnic tensions that’s much deeper than her campaign alone. In her ad, Vallejo makes clear that she has “come to some fundamental decisions about just who [her] constituents are.” She says in her ad, “I stand with the working people of South Texas, because the Valley is worth fighting for.”
The problem is that her opponent, de la Cruz, also feels that the Rio Grande Valley is worth fighting for, but what fighting for the RGV means to de la Cruz is something fundamentally different than what it means to Vallejo—at least if we take her campaign ad to be a true and accurate reflection of her beliefs. The images of Valley residents in Vallejo’s ad are of Mexicans and Mexican Americans gathering in swap meets, restaurant workers, and agricultural workers. Meanwhile, she says that de la Cruz stands for the people—outsiders, to be sure—“who get rich off of our work and our land.”
Certainly, this is not how de la Cruz sees things. Her ads use the same language of fighting for something. One opens with the lines, “When you love something, it’s worth protecting. I’m Monica de la Cruz, and I love America.” I haven’t done a deep dive into all of de la Cruz’s ads, but the border wall features prominently in this one, and if it had other RGV residents in it, I imagine they’d be Mexican American Border Patrol officers or oil workers—the ones who we presume will back her instead of Vallejo. This one features her kids, whom she says she taught to follow the rules, just like her mom taught her.
As is usually the case, the truth is more complicated than what either Vallejo or de la Cruz are saying. Surely, there are working-class Mexican Americans who support de la Cruz, and Border Patrol officers (are they “working class,” too?) who support Vallejo. But we can forgive them for painting such a stark picture—or at least understand why they’ve painted one—since we’re less than two weeks away from an election, and early voting in Texas begins on Monday (just two days after Trump plans to visit the area).
At the end of her ad, Vallejo says something particularly stark. “It’s time to choose,” she says as she stares into the camera, “los vendidos, or nuestra gente.” Vendidos means sellout, and it’s a term that has been applied to conservative Mexican Americans for a long time. Nuestra gente means our people. Even though I’m not conservative myself, I’ve never liked terms like vendido or nuestra gente, because, in my opinion, they rest on faulty and intertwined assumptions. It has never been clear to me who conservatives are selling out, because we’ve never been one people. Yet the logic presumes that Latinos like Vallejo can serve as gatekeepers who judge when some Latinos are selling out, and who our people are.
I think the words rub me the wrong way because of my grandfather—whom you’ll read more about next week—who’s both conservative and a proud Latino. He wasn’t selling out by serving in the Air Force and working in copper mines; he was trying to house and feed his family so they could find some security and, hopefully, have better opportunities than he had. But hey, this is just my opinion based on my own family’s experience, and I’m sure that I won’t change anyone’s mind about who can be called a vendido and who’s included in nuestra gente.
Perhaps a better way of describing what Vallejo means by vendido and nuestra gente is something both she and de la Cruz would agree on, that it’s important to decide who you stand for, and this—certainly in the case of Latinos, but probably all Americans as well—has as much to do with class and other things as it does with race and ethnicity.
(I’m sorry today’s newsletter is a bit later than usual! I went to the Bulls/Pacers game last night, so I didn’t have time to write it until this morning. Here’s a fun story, though: I was especially excited about this game because the first round picks by both the Bulls (Dalen Terry) and the Pacers (Bennedict Mathurin) played college basketball at the University of Arizona. At the end of the game, they faced off for a jump ball. When the arena got as quiet as it was gonna get, I yelled, “Bear Down Arizona.” If you’re from Tucson, you know what this means. If you’re not, you can look it up, if you want. After I yelled that, another fan behind me started chanting “U of A, U of A, U of A.” Man I love the Wildcats, and I love knowing that there are other Wildcats fans in Chicago. See, I told you I’d take the occasional detour to talk about college hoops).