We need a Brown New Deal
Luis Carrasco says Latinos are tired of being demonized or taken for granted, invisible but for the corpses we leave behind.
EL PASO — A year ago, a gunman drove 10 hours from North Texas to my hometown because he wanted to “shoot Mexicans.” He stumbled on a popular Walmart, bustling with families doing back-to-school shopping on a Saturday morning, and opened fire with an AK-47.
I was on my way to Houston when I heard what happened, driving on with growing horror. I sat in my living room, hardly breathing, as scenes of despair and heartbreak played across the evening news. The shooter left a manifesto that spoke of invasion and ethnic replacement, yet the politicians went on about mental health and violent video games.
That’s when the idea came to me. This America is a dim version of its promise. The contract has been broken. An entire community, our nation’s fastest-growing, has been forgotten. We need a new plan. We need a Brown New Deal, I thought, because what we have now is killing us.
There is a certain irony in the thought. The New Deal, spearheaded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, reshaped America for the better in the face of the Great Depression through things such as employment programs, improved worker rights and the creation of Social Security.
It also either ignored or actively discriminated against minorities, leaving jobs such as farm and domestic work out of Social Security, and the Federal Housing Administration’s implementation of government-sanctioned segregation through redlining.
But what is America if not aspirational? If slaveholders could build a great nation on the promise of liberty and equality, then surely there is room in the New Deal for us now.
The Brown New Deal is an idea born out of anger and frustration, and like Roosevelt’s in 1932, it is a call to arms. It is also a plea for help.
America has failed Latinos and we are tired. Tired of being demonized and dehumanized. Tired of bearing the brunt of decisions we have little hand in making and a power structure intent on shutting us out.
We are blamed for apathy even as canvassers skip Latino neighborhoods and hit areas already covered in campaign signs. We are called out for our low voter turnout as state legislators try to gerrymander us into insignificance. We are underrepresented in politics, business, education and popular culture, even as many of us do the work that holds the United States together.
Latinos build America’s homes, pick the crops, heal the sick, teach the children and care for the elderly. We take the early bus.
We are vital in keeping this country running. We should be just as vital in running this country.
Instead, we are taken for granted, invisible but for the growing number of corpses we leave behind, in the Walmart back-toschool aisle, among the cactus and mesquite of Arizona and South Texas, in body bags filling morgues to capacity with COVID victims across the Rio Grande Valley.
The unimaginable
I had hoped that some good would come out of the mass shooting in El Paso. I felt that it would prove to be such a galvanizing moment that the racially charged rhetoric that so inspired the shooter would fade — at least temporarily — from public discourse. That we’d finally have a serious discussion about identity and how to improve the lives of Latinos.
I was wrong. So little has changed.
Latinos across the country were already afraid, long before a 21year-old from Allen, Texas, walked into the Cielo Vista Walmart.
Half of Latinos reported, about a year before the massacre, that their lives in the United States had worsened since Donald Trump’s election, and they had serious concerns about their place in American society, according to the Pew Research Center. Four in 10 Latinos surveyed had experienced an incident of discrimination in the past year and FBI statistics show a steady increase in hate crimes against Latinos. Figures for 2018, the latest available, show there were 485 reported incidents — the highest in nearly a decade.
You would have found little worry among El Pasoans, though, who were used to living in one of the safest cities in the country. A city of 700,000 — 80 percent of them Hispanic — the place feels like a small town.
Many families have called El Paso home for generations and there is a real sense of community, native Anthony Martinez, a 47year-old father of five who works at the El Paso County Attorney’s Office, told me. It’s geographically isolated, with an ethnic, political and social history that’s different from many parts of the United States and Texas.
El Pasoans thought they were protected by that difference, that space. That easy merger of cultures and languages that had spared them from the kind of outright discrimination that is commonplace for many Latinos in the U.S. But to the eyes of a white supremacist, we were all the same.
“He’s decided for you, out of all the things that you are, at that moment, being at Walmart and being brown was the most important aspect of your identity,” Martinez said. “That was going to decide whether you lived or died.”
After the gunfire stopped, 22 people, ranging between 15 and 90 years old, were dead and more than 20 were injured. The last victim, girls youth soccer coach Guillermo Garcia, died in April, raising the death toll to 23. He never left the hospital.
“I don’t think any of us imagined that somebody would go through the effort of getting a weapon, drive 600 miles or more, just for the specific purpose of targeting our friends and neighbors and family,” Martinez said. “It’s happened and yet it still seems to be unimaginable.”
In the aftermath of the shooting, El Paso was resilient. But it was also left somber, watchful and suspicious. The sense of security they had felt was an illusion. If it happened once, they reasoned, it could happen again.
COVID’s toll
El Paso was still in mourning when the city was hit by the novel coronavirus. So far, more than 280 people have died of COVID-19 here — 90 percent of them Hispanic.
Latinos are overrepresented, often even more severely, in COVID-19 deaths throughout the country. The virus now accounts for 1 of 5 deaths among Latinos, according to The Washington Post. In Texas alone, where Latinos are 40 percent of the population, we represent half of all COVID-19 deaths.
That doesn’t surprise U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar. The Democrat from El Paso said Dr. Anthony Fauci was unequivocal when she spoke to him early in the pandemic. “We asked him what the vulnerabilities of the Latino community were, and he said something that made my jaw drop: ‘Latino communities are as vulnerable to COVID as nursing homes and assisted living communities,’” she said.
Many Latinos live in low-income households, are less likely to have health insurance, have underlying issues such as obesity or high blood pressure, and are front-line workers, employed in grocery stores, meatpacking plants, and the service and agriculture industries.
They were asked to go back to work — or never stopped working — long before it was safe. So-called essential workers were deemed expendable as well. Stuck in lowwage jobs with no employer health care, no sick leave, their well being comes second.
To effectively protect these communities, a testing and contact tracing plan has to be even more robust than in a white community, where the risks are typically lower, Escobar said.
We are still waiting.
A war on immigrants
President Trump has made the lives of Latinos harder.
His administration has abdicated its responsibility in the fight against COVID-19, and used the pandemic as an excuse for further crackdowns on immigration.
Most Latinos in America are U.S. citizens, but half of the adults were foreign born. This means many of us have friends or relatives who are directly under siege by this administration’s immigration policies.
Since he took office, the president has ordered more than 400 executive actions on immigration, according to the bipartisan Migration Policy Institute. He has imposed limits on visas, separated families with children at the border, sought to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and terrorized immigrant communities by boosting the presence and aggressiveness of
U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agents in a bid to increase deportations.
Trump has virtually shut down the asylum system, leaving thousands of refugees suffering far from home at camps along the Mexican border or held indefinitely, even as the pandemic rages inside immigrant detention centers, while their cases work their way through a system that is stacked against them.
Disregard for immigrant lives didn’t begin with the Trump administration, of course. Thousands of migrants died in the desert under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the latter known for a time as “Deporter in Chief,” both supportive of policies that funneled immigrants into inhospitable terrain in the name of deterrence.
Latino agenda is America’s
But while Latinos have been detained, deported, disregarded and discarded under presidents of either party, there is something specially cruel about Trump’s approach. Trump began his campaign in 2015 with a slur against Mexicans and on nearly every day since has proven himself incapable of offering Latinos what is the cornerstone of a Brown New Deal: respect.
“In our families we are raised with respect. Sometimes it serves us well, and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s a core value of our culture,” said Houston’s Andy Canales, executive director of Latinos for Education.
It should be so easy to pay Latinos respect in this country. In El Paso and in places all over America, our critical issues line up with those of most other Americans. As Rep. Escobar says, the Latino agenda is the American agenda.
America needs a Brown New Deal because no country can flourish, or even survive, by leaving half its people in the shadows.
Carrasco is an editorial writer and member of the Houston Chronicle’s editorial board. Email him at luis.carrasco@chron.com.