Is Trump’s Campaign a Clash of Civilizations?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer 

Donald Trump’s events in California and the southwest have become particularly violent, with mainly Hispanic/Latino protestors attacking his supporters.

At Trump’s rally in San Jose, California, on June 2, vehicles were damaged, punches were thrown and bystanders sustained bloody injuries. “They get accosted by a bunch of thugs burning the American flag,” Trump said.

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo called it “a dangerous and explosive situation."

One week earlier, Trump was in San Diego, near the Mexican border, in a city about one-third Latino.

Disturbances ensued, and police declared a gathering outside the city’s convention centre unlawful.

They made 35 arrests after stones and water bottles were thrown.

On April 28, in Costa Mesa, California, police clad in riot gear corralled protesters who vandalized police vehicles and harangued Trump supporters as they left a campaign event.

The next day, in Burlingame, protesters threw eggs and spat on police officers. Trump was forced to exit his motorcade and walk through a field, with Secret Service agents helping him, to avoid angry demonstrators.

Some waved signs to denounce him, a group chanted in Spanish while waving Mexican flags, and others burned an American flag.

A rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico in May also turned violent when demonstrators trying to disrupt his speech clashed with riot police, set fire to flags and sent people running in fear.

“The protesters in New Mexico were thugs who were flying the Mexican flag. The rally inside was big and beautiful, but outside, criminals,” Trump later tweeted.

What is behind this? Ethnic tensions have taken center stage in response to the candidate’s proposals to deport illegal immigrants en masse. He has also pledged to build a border wall with Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants.

Is this presidential election beginning to revolve around the relationship of Hispanics to the rest of the American population? Are Trump’s supporters xenophobic racists who oppose Latin American immigration to the country, fearing it will change its culture beyond recognition?

Latinos are now the second-largest ethnic group in the United States. Numbering more than 55 million people, they constitute almost 20 per cent of the American population. They are much younger than the rest of the country, less educated, less wealthy, and with a very large immigrant component.

Almost two-thirds of the Hispanic population originates in Mexico. Their presence is felt throughout the nation, but especially in the southwest. 

The percentage of Hispanics in both California and Texas stands at about 38 per cent and in Arizona, 30 per cent. In New Mexico, as befits its name, almost half are Latino. 

In California, New Mexico and Texas, Latino children now form the majority of young people, and Arizona in 10 years will join them.

Most analysts attribute the anti-Latino feeling to simple racism, which is undoubtedly the case for many. 

But given that most Hispanics live in states adjacent to Mexico, other factors are also involved. There are those who fear that if Hispanics eventually form a majority in the southwest, they may at some point desire to reunite with Mexico. 

These Hispanics are not simple immigrants who have crossed an ocean to get to the United States from a far-off land.

The southwestern quarter of the country used to be the northern half of Mexico before the American annexation of Texas and the conquest of the rest of the southwest in the mid-19^th century.

This was an act of naked imperialism, something that would never be countenanced today.

And it is today a “borderlands” region, with dual cultures. Some writers call it “Mexamerica,” and one hears Spanish at least as often as English. 

These issues were all addressed in a more scholarly way in Harvard professor Samuel Huntington’s last major work, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, published in 2004.

Huntington argued that during the 1960s American identity, long based on a British Protestant culture to which other groups assimilated, began to erode. The issue of Mexican immigration to those regions of the United States adjacent to and acquired from Mexico, in particular, was his main concern.

This large-scale and continuing influx could result, he asserted, in the consolidation of the southwest into a distinct cultural bloc that might bifurcate America. 

Irredentism was his main worry. “No other immigrant group in American history has asserted or has been able to assert a historical claim to American territory,” he contended. “Mexicans and Mexican-Americans can and do make that claim.”

Trump may rail against illegal immigration, but in a sense, Latinos in the southwest aren’t immigrants at all. They were there ahead of all other non-indigenous people. In historical terms, their claim to the region predates that of Americans.