Photo by me

Obviously the major news of the day is that Israel has started a war with Iran that it hopes to drag us into. I’ll have things to say about that in the near future. I had this piece written, however, before Netanyahu launched his attack.

For free subscribers, I’ve removed the paywall on my piece from two days ago on the violence in Los Angeles. I hope you’ll read it.

—LW

At the historic immigration protests in Los Angeles in 2006, when a half million people marched downtown to oppose new federal legislation on immigration enforcement, much of the viewing public saw only one thing: Mexican flags.

They were everywhere, and the optics were terrible. A movement of immigrants making the case that they belonged in America seemed to be advertising their fealty to one of the very countries they were fighting to not be sent to.

Immigration hardliners had a field day. Fox News’ Brit Hume called it “a repellant spectacle.” A group of immigration restrictionists in Arizona burned the Mexican flag in front of the Mexican consulate.

The movement learned quickly from the experience, and within weeks, immigration marches in L.A. were a sea of stars and stripes. The bill was stopped, but immigration reform never happened. A decade later, Trump was elected, then re-elected 8 years later, and here we are.

Now, once again, immigrant rights protesters in L.A. are being castigated for waving Mexican flags. It’s easy to understand the criticism: the images play right into Trump’s depiction of undocumented immigrants as a fifth column in America.

But if I were the son of undocumented parents in Los Angeles today, I’m not sure I’d care this time around. There’s no bill to lobby for. There’s no public opinion to be won over. We’re far past the point of persuasion. Voters were given a choice and elected Trump; he has a mandate on this issue. For the immigrant community in L.A., the fight is no longer political. The resistance effort is physical.

I was in downtown L.A. last Sunday afternoon, when the weekend’s violence reached its crescendo. Activists had taken the southbound lanes of the 101 freeway, and had then been pushed off of it by California Highway Patrol. For the next few hours, the police defended the freeway while protesters stood on surface streets and overpasses about 25 feet above them, hurling rocks and shooting industrial fireworks at the officers, who shot rubber bullets and flashbangs in return. Black plumes of smoke from torched Waymos clogged the sky. Police helicopters and quadcopter drones flew overhead. There were ear-ringing explosions every minute. Amber alerts kept popping up on my phone warning me of the conditions in downtown L.A. that I was right in the middle of.

There must have been a Mexican flag every 15 feet, interspersed by the occasional American flag or combination Mexican-American flag. Under the circumstances, it didn’t seem the least bit inappropriate.

Trump’s attacks on immigrants have explicitly name-checked Mexico since the day he came down the golden escalator. At Stephen Miller’s behest, the latest ICE sweeps have targeted Home Depot parking lots, where Mexican and Central American day laborers gather. Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security tweeted out an anti-immigrant propaganda poster that was created by a white nationalist.

It takes a lot of willful credulousness to believe that Trump’s deportation crusade is not driven in significant measure by racial prejudice. Plenty of Latinos, to be sure, voted for Trump and support his crackdown. That is not incompatible with the persistence of racial disdain in Trump’s coalition. It’s a big country. Lots of things can be true.

Protesters are not waving the Mexican flag for the benefit of the TV-viewing public. They’re waving it for themselves. It’s a symbol of solidarity and defiance against what is very clearly an attack on a specific disfavored community.

“My family, everyone that lives here, they’re just afraid to go out,“ a young man named Daniel Flores told me. “They’re afraid to go to their jobs, the store, home. Even home is not safe for them.”

Amanda and Adriana. Photo by me.

“In our neighborhood, a lot of the families are First Gen, and they’re the most hardworking people we know,” a social worker named Adriana from Boyle Heights, who was there with her sister Amanda, said. They told me their father is American, from L.A., and their mother is from Durango, Mexico. “We’re going to come out for our community because we know a lot of the parents.”

I think on some level, many of the haters understand the real meaning behind the Mexican flags but pretend not to. Despite its avowed contempt for identity politics, the right has gone all in on the idea that America is in the midst of a massive wave of antisemitism. Their response has been to plaster the halls of Congress with Israeli flags outside of their office doors. “We fly the American flag in America,” tweeted Representative Jim Jordan, who has an Israeli flag outside of his Congressional office door.

Do these politicians believe that their embrace of the Israeli flag is a sign of their dual loyalty to the United States? Obviously not. More likely, they regard it as a sign of their solidarity with a group they perceive to be embattled, no different from straight “allies” flying LGBT flags.

There’s actually a much better case to be made that Jim Jordan has secret loyalty to Israel than that American protesters have secret loyalties to Mexico. Israel has plain lobbying interests in Congress and its American support groups spend a lot of money pursuing them. The theory that legislators might put Israel’s interests ahead of those of Americans is as self-evident as the theory that they put corporate interests before those of their constituents. What exactly is the theory as to why immigrants and their kids have some nefarious allegiance to Mexico? Their “Marxist indoctrination” by pointy-headed college professors and the New York Times? The debate quickly descends into a fever swamp.

What’s actually happening is not the least bit mysterious. People are waving Mexican flags to show that they’re unashamed of being immigrants or relatives of immigrants in the face of a campaign to malign them. That’s an important thing to do when you’re mustering your community to its self-defense. Those who despise immigrants, meanwhile, are using the opportunity to cast them as treasonous ingrates.

It may not be politically well-advised to make it so easy for your critics to vilify you by waving a foreign flag. But that case made a lot more sense in 2006 than it does today. Back then, legislation mattered to immigrant families, and American public opinion was thus critical. We’re beyond that now. Today, immigrant households in L.A. have only one thing left to strive for: to make it as hard as possible for ICE agents to do their jobs. Waving American flags does nothing to serve that goal.

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