Latinx Narratives on Police Brutality, Respectability Politics, and Historical Erasure
Photo by Mario Rubén Carrión.
Following a week of protests and violence across the country, the United States is now experiencing a crisis on two fronts: a global pandemic that has killed over 100,000 individuals, and a reckoning with the systemic problems of policing and race.
Because of their long, in some cases overlapping, history of also being victimized by state violence, outrage over African American victims of police brutality prompts a broader discussion that includes Latinxs and their combating of state violence through various means such as drafting petitions, creating political organizations, and engaging in protests and urban rebellions. High profile police killings of African Americans since the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 have led journalists and activists to ponder why Latinos killed by the police have remained under the radar. Collectively, they cite immigration, which to some is a more pressing matter, media bias, the black-white binary, and statistical limitations as possible reasons. All these claims have some degree of validity.
But commentators often gloss over several contributing factors that are inextricably linked, among them an abysmal understanding of Latinx history; the politics of respectability; and the perpetual perception of Latinxs as foreign.
To Americans at large, state violence against Latinxs has no historical context. Whether it is the police, an ICE agent, or border patrol that murders a Latinx individual, Americans view it as an anomaly, rather than as a systemic issue. Much of this stems from Latinx history absence in school curriculum and nascent development in public history. It is not uncommon for students graduating from high school and college to know little to nothing about Latinx history, let alone Latin American history.
This ignorance was on full display after the tragic mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. On August 3, 2019, a 21-year-old white man killed and injured 46 people, deliberately targeting Mexican Americans. Writing for The Atlantic after the massacre, NPR host Lulu Garcia-Navarro noted “the headlines in our largest papers and the cable-news chyrons omitted or downplayed the historic nature of the carnage in El Paso.” Garcia-Navarro attributed the omission largely to Latinxs absence in newsrooms and the overwhelming whiteness of elite journalism. But white journalists’ apparent abysmal knowledge of anti-Mexican violence attributed to the problem as well.
Photo by Mario Rubén Carrión.
Photo by Mario Rubén Carrión.
Media organizations should be held liable for neglecting to discuss police brutality against Latinxs, especially since they employ few Latinx people. His argument, however, ultimately strips Latinx agency. The politics of respectability have long suppressed the concerns of the poor and working-class. As New York University anthropologist Arlene Dávila notes in her book Latino Spin, since the late 1980s, middle- and upper-middle class Latinx professionals have promoted marketable images of Latinxs by characterizing the group as upwardly mobile, hardworking, family oriented, entrepreneurial, law abiding, and inherently conservative. Latinx and non-Latinx, conservatives and liberals alike, have supported these depictions to show that Latinxs are not a social liability for society. Stories about police brutality, however, obscure these narratives.
Another factor is the racist and classist underpinnings of the politics of respectability which distances Latinxs from African Americans. Viewers of Univision and Telemundo, the top Spanish-speaking news stations in the United States, have criticized both companies for promoting anti-Blackness in their coverage of protests surrounding George Floyd’s death by a Minneapolis police officer. News segments have focused on the violence, looting, and public officials condemning the protests rather than inform their viewers about the root of the protests, their privilege, and recognizing that Blackness comprises Latinx identity. But this neglect is unsurprising coming from two news stations that have overwhelmingly White broadcasters. Additionally, both have been mired in controversies over broadcasters uttering racist statements and for their underrepresentation of Afro-Latinx journalists.
Photo by Redens Desrosiers.
Photo by Mario Rubén Carrión.
This practice of anti-Blackness extends beyond Latinx media companies. Political activists have often acknowledged the similarities between both groups, but simultaneously insisted that the two groups’ struggles are not isomorphic. There are historical and contemporary examples of this practice playing out during times of social justice movements. Paul Andow, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (1963-65), drew a distinction between African Americans’ struggles for civil rights and Latinxs. “We have not sought solutions to problems by marching to Washington, sit-in's or picketing or other outward manifestations,” he began, “we have always gone to the source of the problem and discussed it intelligently in a calm and collected manner.” Decades later, amidst the nascent Black Lives Matter movement, writer Héctor Tobar in a New York Times op-ed echoed a similar sentiment when he declared “we Latinos suffer from a rage deficit.” He went onto claim that the Latinx students he spoke to at California State University, Los Angeles, “resist oppression in a low-key, goal-oriented way.” They strived for good grades, he claimed, worked while obtaining a degree, and desired to become breadwinners to give back to their communities. Both statements juxtaposed Latinxs as naturally humble and implicitly portrayed African Americans as more militant. On the other hand, they both minimized contemporary and nascent political activism within Latinx communities.
Even in times of social upheaval among Latinxs, middle- and upper-middle class professionals have sought to portray the events as anomalies and ignore recent history, whether willingly or unwillingly. After the uprising against police brutality in Newark, New Jersey’s Puerto Rican community in September 1974, the Star Ledger quoted one resident named Carmen Conway who claimed, “Puerto Ricans are very quiet as far as rioting is concerned…when they explode, something extraordinary has happened.” Exactly ten years later, MIT professor Yohel Camayd-Freixas made a similar statement after a violent clash between Latinx and White residents in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1984. “Riots among Hispanics are highly unusual,” he insisted. “Things have got to be extremely serious when rioting breaks out among Hispanics.” “Extraordinary” and “extremely serious” designated that only in unprecedented situations could a group deemed as passive resort to rioting. Both statements overlooked the numerous urban uprisings among Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans that had occurred on the mainland since the mid-1960s.
Photo by Redens Desrosiers.
Photo by Redens Desrosiers.
All racial and ethnic groups with a history of marginalization have sought to uplift themselves with positive imagery. Respectability narratives are needed to combat anti-immigration sentiment and negative portrays of Latinx people. But they simultaneously undermine the diverse stories and experiences of Latinxs themselves. From the downtrodden to the elite. SUNY Old Westbury American Studies Professor Llana Barber noted in her book Latino City, these narratives erase the stories of the incarcerated, jobless, welfare-recipient, political radicals and, yes, even rioters. All these groups form the collective experiences of Latinxs in the United States. Knowing these stories will better inform people about the dynamics of Latinxs’ interactions with law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
The perpetual foreigner perception obscures Latinx history as well. Latinx people, along with Asian Americans, are often deemed as foreigners regardless of whether they are naturalized or native-born citizens. Additionally, the presence of immigrants can reduce the histories of long-established communities as recently established or dismiss its prior history as insignificant. There are archives located in communities where little to nothing exists on Latinxs residents. For example, Holyoke, Massachusetts has one of the largest percentages of Puerto Ricans in the United States, but archivists only began a more concerted effort to preserve the group’s history in 2016. A community that emerged in the 1950s.
Historians of the future should remain cognizant that although media organizations have overlooked Latinxs within recent years, Latinxs have not sat on the sidelines. Those who have supported Black Lives Matter have recognized their overlapping history with African Americans, condemned anti-Blackness within their own community, and acknowledged Blackness is an essential component of Latinx identity. Young people in their respective communities are engaged in activism, working to dismantle anti-blackness in Latinx communities and showing support for individuals such as Jessica Hernandez, Jose Cruz, and Jesse Romero, all teenagers killed by the police. When an off-duty police officer in Farmer Branch, Texas shot and killed sixteen-year-old Jose Cruz after pursuing him and his friend for stealing a third-row seat from his vehicle, young people went onto YouTube and uploaded tributes to Cruz. As of today, one video has over half a million views.
Latinx people are also on the front lines of the recent protests and have expressed outrage about police violence. Documenting these actions challenges racist and elitist narratives of respectability, past and present, and reveals the diversity of Latinx activism and political thought that has coincided with perceptions of propriety.
Aaron G. Fountain Jr. is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Indiana University. His writings have appeared in Al Jazeera America, The Hill, Latino Rebels, etc.
Photos courtesy of Mario Rubén Carrión and Redens Desrosiers.