The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Activists: Police killings of Latinos lack attention
RIO RANCHO, N.M. — Forty-year-old Antonio Valenzuela’s death didn’t spark widespread protests like George Floyd’s. In fact, the police killing of Valenzuela drew little attention outside the American Southwestern city just north of the U.S.Mexico border.
The details about Floyd’s death, a 46-year-old Black man, who died in May at the hands of Minneapolis police closely resembles that of Valenzuela, a Mexican American man, who was killed in Las Cruces, New Mexico, three months before global protests and outrage. Like Floyd, Valenzuela died from a choking maneuver during an encounter with an officer after a struggle.
As national Black Lives Matter demonstrations grow, Latino activists are joining the multiracial protests while trying to draw attention to their deadly police encounters, some of which go back decades. Latino advocates and families of those killed by police say they aren’t trying to pull the focus away from Black lives, but want to illustrate their own suffering from policing and systemic racism.
Activists say cases from Phoenix to Springfield, Mass., point to patterns of violent interactions by police against Latinos similar to those of Black people. As with the killings of Black men and women, officers rarely face punishment in the death of Latinos. However, Latino cases seldom garner national attention, even when caught on video.
The lack of attention around Latinos and police highlights how little is known about Latino history in the U.S. and the racism endured in the American Southwest and the U.S.Mexico border. It also marks the backlash some Mexican Americans face when trying to join the national conversation about race.
According to the Washington Post, between 2015 and April 2020, Black Americans are killed at the highest rate in the U.S. (31 per million residents). Latinos are killed at the second-highest rate, 23 per million residents, according to the newspaper’s analysis. Both are disproportionate rates considering their percentages of the population.