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“I don’t want to become you, I don’t want to speak your language, I don’t want to celebrate your holidays, I sure as hell don’t want to cheer for your soccer team!”- Lou Holtz, retired coach of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, Republican National Convention 2016.
A specter is haunting white nationalists in the U.S. and their vision of a white homeland. Their fear is that the country of their birth is becoming less and less white. And indeed, between July 2010 through July 2011 – for the first time since births had been tracked – the number of non-white babies born in the U.S. outnumbered those of white children. By 2042, it is estimated that the total population will become a “minority majority nation.”
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The politics of fear is nothing new. Voices such as Pat Buchanan – author of the 2002 book, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, and Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?; Ann Coulter Adios America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole, 2015; and the late Samuel Huntington, author of Who are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity , 2008, all warned of the loss of cultural and political integrity of the US that would come with demographic shifts.
Buchanan’s book, Suicide of a Superpower, included a chapter called “Death of White America.” Samuel Huntington contained the argument that “there is no such thing as the Sueno Americano and if people want it they better learn to dream in English.” Ann Coulter’s Adios America includes a chapter simply titled “Thirty Million Mexicans.”
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While promoting her book she said to Jorge Ramos “If you don’t want to be killed by ISIS don’t fly to Syria, if you don’t want to be killed by a Mexican I don’t know what to tell you.” This was less than a month before Donald Trump opened his campaign by characterizing Mexican born migrants as drug dealers and rapists.
For border warriors who stand in defense of “borders, language, culture,” this is not entirely about the wall, or the law. At a deeper level it’s about the fact that too many Mexicans and other peoples from Latin America are living within U.S. borders for their comfort.
It is not – as Lou Holtz and other eugenicists say – that they personally fear becoming Mexican, but rather they fear that the presence of Mexicans and other peoples of Latin America will destroy the cultural, political, linguistic and racial composition of the country.
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Donald Trump’s endless attack on Mexican people– from his defense of the wall, to the absurd claim that “Mexico will pay,” to physically ejecting Jorge Ramos and telling him “go back to Univision,” to inspiring hate crimes and then responding that his supporters are “passionate,” to questioning a judge’s impartiality on the basis of his “being proud” of his Mexican heritage, citing the Mexican repatriation act as well as operation wetback for his deportation policy, his assertion that the country of Mexico was lying to the Pope about him and on and on and on – is not, in and of itself, the problem. It is symptomatic of a much larger problem – with deep roots in U.S. soil – that will continue to grow and expand as the numbers continue to shift.
Donald Trump will lose to Hillary Clinton for myriad reasons, not the least of which is that this is the will of the billionaires, but that's a whole other article altogether. The border politics of today are roughly now what they were when the borders were forged: bloody, full of hate and victim-blaming.
With the demographic shift, the politics of the southwest are going national. There is no reason to think this will not continue to happen and shape U.S. politics as a whole, well into the future.
Trump will lose. There will be more Donald Trumps.
Matt Sedillo is a poet, worker and artist living in Los Angeles. A two-time national slam poet, grand slam champion of the Damn Slam Los Angeles 2011 and the author of For What I Might Do Tomorrow published by Caza De Poesia 2010. His poetry has been published in anthologies alongside the likes of such literary giants as Amiri Baraka, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Hircshman and Luis Rodriguez.
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