Pelosi moves against Trump
Riot: Immigrants who fled unrest now see alarmingly similar scene
In one of Myrna Melgar’s earliest childhood memories, her mother flips over the dining room table and pushes it against their sliding glass doors — “for protection, in case the glass shattered.” Off in the distance they heard explosions. They didn’t live far from the El Salvadoran president’s home, where a military coup was under way in 1979.
That memory came back Wednesday as Melgar, San Francisco’s newly elected supervisor for District Seven, watched a mob, incited by PresiCapitol
dent Trump, overtake police and storm the U. S. Capitol building. It all felt “crazy,” she said, preparing to be sworn into office “in the middle of seeing our country fall apart.”
When more than five years of Trump’s heated political rhetoric culminated in insurrection, the scene for many Americans was unimaginable, like nothing they’d ever witnessed. But for others, like Melgar, the images from the Capitol brought back memories of the political turmoil that moved them or their parents to seek a new home in the United States in the first place.
“It triggered that memory,” Melgar said. “So much for American exceptionalism, right?”
For most of Wednesday morning, Fouzia Palyal Azizi had her TV switched off. She was trying to concentrate on her work as the director of refugee services at Jewish Family & Community Services East Bay. But a little before noon, her 17yearold son came into the room, and he looked “shook,” she said. “The color in his face was pale.” He told her to turn on the news.
Azizi watched as rioters rushed the Capitol building, smashed windows and trashed congressional offices. It all felt achingly familiar. Before she fled Afghanistan in 1994, she had watched Islamists ignore law enforcement and flood and loot government buildings. “It was quite a flashback,” she said, to “all those old memories you don’t want to remember.”
At first, Azizi described herself as “disappointed and shocked” by the events in Washington, but then she reassessed. “That’s probably not the whole truth,” she said.
Nothing really surprises her about Trump anymore. She has spent four years trying to contend with his policies and rhetoric, both of which have made it especially hard to be a refugee in America — both for her family and for the refugees she works to help. “That’s not America, what you’re witnessing,” she tells them. “The actual America wants you here.”
Some of those families, from Eritrea and Pakistan and Afghanistan, had been in touch after the attack on the Capitol. “They never thought in a country like America, such things would happen,” Azizi said. “A little bit they were in a panic. Will our children be safe in this country? What can happen to us?”
Movie star and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger posted a video Sunday on Twitter comparing the attack to Nazi assaults on Jews before World War II. Schwarzenegger, who was born in Austria two years after the war ended, said he grew up surrounded by “broken men,” including his father, “drinking away their guilt over their participation in the most evil regime in history.”
For Paymon ShariatPanahi, whose parents immigrated to the United States after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, having a “familial history” with political unrest tempered some of the shock he saw in other Americans. Growing up, he said, he was close to his grandma and often mined her for stories about Iran. If what happened in Washington reminded him of anything, it was her stories about the 1953 coup orchestrated by the U. S.
There was a certain irony, said ShariatPanahi, who lives in Hayward, in what unfolded at the Capitol. “I think for a lot of Americans there’s this idea of American exceptionalism that’s baked into our institutions, but for us, at the same time we’ve already seen that ugly side of American foreign policy. To see this play out at home, it was a little bit like watching the chickens come home to roost.”
His family in Iran has been watching the rise of white nationalism in the United States, and they’ve seen how the country has struggled to deal with the pandemic. Lately, they’ve been asking whether he ought to think about moving somewhere
else. And on Wednesday, they kept checking in over WhatsApp. What’s going on there? Are you guys OK? “My family thought it was a rightwing coup in the United States.”
The fact that a coup has never happened here doesn’t mean that it can’t. That’s what Ingrid Granados kept trying to explain to her husband as he worked to calm her. She had been watching on TV at home in San Jose as the crowd outside the Capitol building pushed nearer. “They’re getting way too close,” she remembers thinking. And then suddenly they were in. “This can’t be real. This can’t be real,” she thought.
Immediately, she called her sister. “We couldn’t understand why we were so anxious. I felt like I was going to throw up. I still feel like I’m going to throw up,” she said a day later.
Eventually she realized what it was: Her parents, brother and sister had fled El Salvador after the coup there. Granados was born in the United States, but she visited often enough during the country’s civil war in the 1980s and early ’ 90s that she remembers it. She and her sister talked about the bombing sirens. “I remember when I was little they would tell me they were fireworks.”
So, as her husband tried to calm her, all she could think was that unrest can happen anywhere, and it can escalate. In El Salvador, “my parents were fine, in a house and stuff,” she said. Until they weren’t. “We came here because we had to. … I think any immigrant, any person who has come from turmoil or had to leave their homes because of that — I don’t think the United States has ever seen this or really felt this. For
the rest of us, it’s a lot of PTSD.”
“PTSD” was the same term Jerri Dulla used to describe what she felt when her brother told her the mob was “storming the Capitol.” The anxiety set in almost immediately. “It brought on this feeling of doom.”
Dulla, who is 46 and lives in Sacramento, grew up in the Philippines. Her first memory of a major political moment was in 1983, when Philippine senator Benigno Aquino Jr. was assassinated on the tarmac at the airport in Manila. Aquino was a staunch opponent of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and the years that followed were filled with political instability. She remembers gunfire in the streets. “It was like, ‘ Not this again,’ because school was disrupted.”
In the back of her mind, Dulla said, she always suspected instability could happen here. That so many others didn’t believe that, even after Trump’s election, sometimes made her feel like she was stuck “in a different reality.”
“You keep talking to people about this and they’re like, ‘ Oh no. This is America. This isn’t going to happen. People are not going to allow this to happen,’ ” she said.
Still, it was hard to make sense of the scenes from the Capitol, she said. “I thought I was so far away from that world.”