Hate identifies enemy, and fear pulls trigger

A friend once told me that the Mexican American label attached to her was misleading, because she didn’t consider herself Mexican at all.

To self-identify as such seemed inaccurate. Even the less specific “Latina” seemed off.

My parents have Mexican roots and I have visited Mexico, she said, but that’s as far as it goes. I don’t speak Spanish. I don’t listen to music or watch TV in Spanish. I don’t eat Mexican food or particularly like it.

My extended family is different; I swing at piñatas and go to quinceañeras, but those celebrations are not something I include in my own life because it’s not really me.

There’s nothing wrong with the Mexican part, she stressed so as not to offend; it’s just not my part. I’m just American.

This conversation came to mind when details of last week’s mass shooting in El Paso unfolded, a massacre in which a gunman was targeting Mexicans.

The targets were not illegal aliens, undocumented workers, naturalized citizens who waited in line, bilingual Texans or Texans who speak English without a trace of an accent. Those in the crosshairs weren’t hyphenated, Latino nativists, recent arrivals or descendants of the Mescalero Apaches who predated the Spanish colonization of the Southwest.

The targets were Mexicans and anybody else who got in the way. A man who was shot trying to distract the gunman reportedly saw the shooter selectively target Hispanic shoppers while other people ran out of the building.

In addition, the shooter is believed to have written a hate-filled document published online in which he railed against an “invasion,” specifically in Texas.

Invasion. The word is powerful; it incites fear, implies a takeover, warns of impending loss. It’s a word meant to stir an uncomfortable panic at a nearing crisis. And, at least in the case of the tragedy in El Paso, it was a call to arms.

On Tuesday, CNN reported that President Donald Trump has run nearly 2,200 Facebook posts warning Americans of an “invasion.” That doesn’t even count the use of the word “invasion” during public speeches and his Twitter posts.

The president said that it was mental illness and hatred that pulled the trigger in El Paso, and those two might have had a hand in this particular case. But the main triggerman in this massacre was fear — the fear of an invasion. There are groups whose sole purpose is to be racially divisive and invoke fear. And while President

Trump has been blatantly using fear to stir the political pot, politicians have been stoking the fires of fear for their own gain for years.

There’s a danger of earmarking a group of people as a threat, because fear isn’t contained by details.

Fear doesn’t care that the American Southwest was half of Mexico and that a lot of the so-called invaders were here before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave them a choice to stay or go.

Fear doesn’t care about assimilation or citizenship, hyphens, what language you speak at the store or if people are looking for a better life.

Fear took aim at a teenager shopping with his aunt, a mother shielding her infant and a grandfather shielding his granddaughter because they were, at some point, described as a threat.

It doesn’t matter how we self-identify — or even who we really are. When a powerful social construct defines a group of us as an enemy threat, fear handily takes control.

And that is what pulls the trigger on the too easily attainable, loosely regulated, constitutionally protected gun.

Invasion. The word is a powerful; it incites fear, implies a takeover, warns of impending loss. And, at least in the case of the tragedy in El Paso, it was a call to arms.

Jim Wilson / New York Times People pray last week during a vigil for the victims in El Paso, targeted because they were “Mexican.”