Hispanics threatened from within own country

The mass shooting in El Paso was one of the deadliest hate crimes in American history against Latinos.

The fear among Latino people is palpable.

The killing of 22 people in the border city has left them fearful of living in their own country: because of the color of their skin, because they speak Spanish or because of where they or their families were born.

Latino and Latina voices from across America tell what it’s like:

A MOTHER, CHURCH LEADER Veronica Arroyo Bonet Fort Myers, Florida

She stands between church pews in a wide aisle that stretches past an American flag to the pulpit. This is where she prays.

Since the shooting, she’s watched the faces of Latino children and parents at El Buen Samaritano in Fort Myers, where she’s a church leader; at the Lee County schools where she’s a teacher’s aide; at the malls and parks of Cape Coral, where she lives; and at home with her own children, her own friends and family.

She knows their fear: “To come out on the street and being shot.”

There’s no norm for Latinos in America, not anymore, not since El Paso, she says.

For Latinos, everything has changed.

“The Latino community are always thinking, ‘Is this the day that we’re going to have a maniac, a wacko

come into the store and shoot you because you’re black, you’re Hispanic?’ ” she says. “That’s the reality – it’s nervewracking.”

Racist, hate-filled rhetoric, she says, has pushed anti-immigrant policy, has turned neighbors against neighbors and spurred mass shootings.

“I’m convinced that the political stage out there with the president, with Congress, with this certain type of behavior, we feel that we’ve been targeted because of the issue with (the) Mexican border, the issue of all these immigrants and saying they don’t have documents, they don’t have papers,” she says.

Being a citizen, she says, doesn’t protect Latinos from a white supremacist with a gun, and it hasn’t protected her children from words that make them feel like they are less than worthy in their own country. “I’m a proud Puerto Rican, American citizen, that has come to this country. We’re also American citizens … and I have encouraged my kids to be someone here, to make their dreams come true,” she says. “And they see and they hear all this, ‘Why they keep telling us to go back to our country? We’re also American citizens.’ ”

She relies on her faith. “I hope that God will be in control and that these politicians try to focus in a different way where they keep God in their lives,” she says. “The best thing that we were able to do was to get on our knees and pray and keep praying for all of our children, our families, our communities.”

A WORKERS RIGHTS ACTIVIST

Rosa Lopez

Passaic County, New Jersey

She travels the back roads and highways of northeastern New Jersey, meeting with migrants and workers fighting for their rights.

She knows what happened in El Paso. It happened where the USA meets Mexico, where her ancestors were born.

“I feel extremely frustrated knowing that these are acts of white supremacy and knowing how vulnerable our communities are,” she says.

Some days, she’s more afraid of nothing changing than she is of bullets. “I am afraid of people not taking action, that is my biggest fear right now,” she says. “I think this is our crucial moment for our communities to be even more organized.”

She works as an organizer for Make the Road New Jersey. The black-andwhite banner for the grass-roots organization shows people of all backgrounds on a boat floating over a message: Dignidad. Comunidad. Poder. (Dignity. Community. Power.)

“Whenever actions like this happen, whenever acts of violence happen, when mass shootings happen, it’s usually directed toward minorities, migrants, toward Muslims and people of color, so we have always been subjected to violence,” she says. “I think this is the time for allies and white people to realize that they are playing a role, either by not saying anything or they can also play a role by saying something.”

She says Latinos with legal authorization to live in the USA and those without legal status are coupled more than ever. They were bound by their roots and now by their blood because a man with a gun wanting to kill brown people doesn’t know whether they’re citizens, doesn’t care where they’re from or what political party they choose.

Lopez worries about a future for children growing up in a country that refuses to learn from its not-so-distant past. “I think that there is also a failure in the educational system in this country that it clearly is failing to teach real history to students, to kids, to young people about how this country was created and about slavery and about genocide,” she says. “My message to young children is that you belong here, we all belong here.”

A VOLUNTEER

Dano Mendoza

Dover, New Jersey

He stands in a grassy park named after President John F. Kennedy, wearing a T-shirt named for the faith-based organization where he volunteers.

When he’s not working at his warehouse job, he teaches migrants their rights, teaching them what to do if police or immigration officials show up.

The park is about a block from Dover Town Hall, where Wind of the Spirit organizers have fought for driver’s licenses and city IDs for undocumented immigrants. Latino migrants bring their children here.

Mendoza says Wind of the Spirit’s mission isn’t just words: “We strive to create an environment free of discrimination. At our core, we are motivated to act by the challenges that immigrants in the United States continue to face.”

He wishes he could believe his country is changing for the better. He says he sees the American dream slipping away.

“One of the greatest countries in the world is falling backwards in a certain kind of, let’s say, racism, discrimination. We are supposed to be a country, a leader country, we are supposed to lead the world,” he says. “And I’m afraid that we are not doing so, by the mistakes we are committing now as a nation.”

AN ARTIST

La Lisa Hernandez

Corpus Christi, Texas

The late Latina music sensation Selena and former President Barack Obama ate in this small restaurant.

Hi-Ho restaurant has a reputation for good Mexican food and people who love their culture and their families. Standing among the tables is a woman with long red hair that matches her tinted eyeglasses.

“I’m definitely angry … because this is the manifestation of the hate speech that was unleashed in our political arena and has just been poisoning our community from the top down,” she says. “It’s given license to people to disregard the humanity of others.”

It’s been building, she says: “I feel like temperatures are just boiling over right now with hate in this country, and folks that say that they don’t see it are being willfully ignorant every day.”

She’s an artist. She has painted pieces with messages against domestic violence. Now she sees domestic terrorism against her own Latino community.

AN IMMIGRATION ATTORNEY

Ruben Reyes

Phoenix

He’s finalizing plans to go home for a visit. He wasn’t in El Paso when the shooting happened.

When his phone rang and his father said, “I’m OK,” he wondered what was going on.

That’s when he learned a gunman had gone to a Walmart – the one at the border, the one his family visits all the time – to kill Mexicans.

His hometown, the place where he was born, where everyone he loves lives, was terrorized.

He keeps replaying the shooting in his mind. The bloody images come at night, when he wakes up, when he’s working or driving. He thinks of the mindset of the man who killed 22 people. “I mean that’s scary, that somehow they will import themselves into what I think is one of the safest cities in the country and kill people for the color of their skin,” he says. “It’s absolutely crazy.”

Reyes says that he’s used to racism, that he grew up with it and navigated it throughout his adult life. But the words, the rhetoric, the discrimination have taken a deadly turn.

“It’s real. It’s violent. And sometimes it ends lives,” he says. “To think of people seeing El Paso as a pot of potential targets for them to go in and have shooting practice takes it to a place I never thought I had to consider.”

If anything is going to change, he says, Latinos must come together after this shooting, protect each other and push for political and societal change.

He’s an independent, but he’s becoming fed up with what he hears from Republicans. Politics are part of his life as an immigration attorney in a country where the border and migrants are in the news every day.

“What people say matters, what the president says matters, how we speak to each other matters, what we exchange on social media matters,” he says. “Places like 8chan, where you have the Daily Stormer or other white nationalist groups who are calling the El Paso shooter a saint, all these things are going to feed into that individual who is waiting for some kind of green light.”

When he leaves his home, he thinks about being shot at. He thinks about his children being shot at. And he thinks of how he’d protect them from a gunman. Those are things he never considered on a daily basis before.

“The capacity of my fellow Americans to target me or my family or my loved ones simply because I don’t look like them, and the ease of which some have proven to be willing to pull a trigger,” he says, “it’s absolutely terrifying.”

Reyes won’t let a killer take away his rights.

“Trying to say that I need to become

something to become American, in my mind, invalidates everything that is American,” he says. “I am American by the fact that I am here. I was born here, raised here, educated here, I went to the military here. I was willing to die for the people here. I went to school here. I became a lawyer here. I own a business here.

“I am the American dream.”

A MIGRANT RIGHTS ADVOCATE

Luis Espinoza

Jackson, Mississippi

Most days, he goes to the Greyhound station and waits for people seeking asylum in the USA to arrive.

When they step off the bus, strangers in a place where they have nothing and know no one, he offers clothes, food, a smile.

He’s lived in America for 28 years. He was born in Ecuador. Two decades ago, he chose to make Mississippi home.

Espinoza says he thinks about life when he first came to America and wants to ease the way for others. He’s an organizer with Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, MIRA for short, which means “look” in Spanish.

The shooting in El Paso made the nation pay attention to what Latinos have long feared was building since Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign, propagating stereotypes about Mexicans, he says.

“I think what we need is to ask the authorities, the leaders (to) change what the words they are using,” he says. “Most of the people, they understand you are making just politics, but maybe somebody, somebody who is out of his mind use those words to say, ‘OK, yeah, I’m saving the country. I’m saving my race.’ ”

Authorities linked a hate-filled screed to a 21-year-old white man who drove 10 hours from Dallas to El Paso. In 2,356 words posted to an extremist online message board shortly before the shooting, the manifesto decried a “Hispanic invasion,” political takeover of Texas and a plan to divide America into territories based on race.

A few days after the shooting, Espinoza went back to the bus station, back to waiting, back to helping strangers who crossed the border for better. He saw something that made him think things might get better for his country.

A group of teenage girls and women stopped by to pass out letters and food. They comforted weary families and learned more about what it means to be an immigrant.

“Not everything is wrong,” he says. “The good people will win in the end.”

A COLLEGE STUDENT

Angélica Cesar

Tempe, Arizona

She was in Alabama with a group of young Latino people learning about slavery, the Civil Rights Movement and America’s history of racism and discrimination when she heard about the shooting in El Paso.

“My stomach dropped,” she says. “It sometimes feels like we haven’t shifted much from what people have been fighting for, for years and years, specifically with the racial terror and being seen as less human simply because of the color of your skin or because you speak a different language or you have a certain accent.”

Cesar was born in California but moved to Mexico City for 10 years before returning to the USA.

She says the first time she felt Latinas were treated differently in America was when she was a child in an English class.

“I had a German classmate who was treated completely different than I was,” she says. “Her language was celebrated while mine wasn’t, so I’d always felt that difference. I always knew that it was there ... growing up.”

She calls herself a proud Mexican American, so it’s hard to feel fear about who she is when she loves who she is.

“I think the biggest fear is that any of my closest friends or any of my family members or anybody really who’s a part of our community could be targeted for that simple fact of the color of your skin,” she says.

The shooting hasn’t just changed how she sees herself, her community and the country she was born in, it’s made her go about her daily life differently.

“It rocked me to my core because I saw that those mini-aggressions and that hate, those passive comments translated into something that actually took 22 people’s lives,” she says.

“As a young Latina, politics … it’s brought about some sense of hopelessness but also given me hope at the same time,” she says. “Is this ever going to get any better? Is it even worth trying? But then you also … know that there are people who are still working who have good hearts and who will continue to do the work until we’re at a place where people can be safe and be at ease with who they are.”

She works for Aliento, an organization that supports young undocumented migrants.

Since the shooting, she’s been checking in with the kids, making sure they understand they’re not alone.

AN ARTIST AND WITNESS

Guillermo Glenn

El Paso, Texas

He went to pick up a few things at Walmart. The center was busy, as it is most days. Walking down a crowded aisle, he saw something that didn’t make sense.

“I knew there was something really wrong ... but what really confirmed it was I saw a couple of women who were bloody,” he says. “I knew then that there was a shooting.”

He threw aside his cart, but he didn’t run. “I noticed that this middle-aged woman had been shot in the legs and she was sitting right in the aisle,” he says. “She couldn’t get up. So me and an elderly lady, we stayed with her, because she was very panicked. She didn’t know where her son was. We were trying to calm her down.”

He didn’t know how the experience would settle inside of him later. He didn’t understand, not fully, how a mass shooting in his border town of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans would hit Latinos across the nation.

He is trying to make sense of the event and to figure out how to move forward.

“I think we connect it up to a lot of the things that, for instance, President Trump has been saying about immigrants, and we feel very strongly that we’re being targeted,” he says. “That young man from Dallas had an idea about where he was going. He didn’t do it by chance.

“He knew there were other white supremacists around El Paso,” Glenn says. “We have those people fundraising for the wall, and they are armed. We fear that’s going to attract other people to come to the border.”

Glenn, 78, says he’s not afraid to speak the truth because more truth about what people of color live with might help others stop living in denial.

“In Texas and here in El Paso, there’s a strong effort to cover it up if there’s any problems of race,” he says. “We can be unified, but we shouldn’t cover up the racism that has existed and exists in El Paso.”

Sitting at a restaurant and cultural center, Glenn thinks about how to talk with Latino children about the shooting, about how to ease their fears and teach them better.

“We certainly don’t want to promote racism, reverse racism. We don’t want to create monsters that somehow are attacking us,” he says. “I think it depends a lot on the age group, but also depends historically on what they read and what the schools teach.”

He worries that Latino children aren’t taught to know that they have a history, place and culture in America that dates back to before the USA was formed.

“Last year was the first time that they implemented what was called Mexican American history,” he says. “Here is Texas, they were trying to eliminate Cesar Chavez from the schoolbooks.”

Glenn says he won’t give up on helping migrants in his hometown and country, even if that makes him more of a target.

“We are not going to stop having open meetings in our community . ... We have to do our work,” he says. “Because our work is all about injustices and trying to defend a low-income immigrant community . ... We feel that puts us perhaps in the crosshairs of some of these people.”

There’s the saying that people have used since the shooting to describe his community’s resilience: El Paso Strong. He says the rest of his state, maybe the rest of the country, could learn from a city filled with people who have loved ones, jobs, friends and family on both sides of the border.

“Sometimes I don’t feel … El Paso is really part of Texas,” he says. “We’re such a long ways, in a different time zone. El Paso Strong I think represents something that perhaps the rest of Texas needs.”