Latinx Files: Anti-immigrant sentiments from Latinos is nothing new

Back in August, while doing preliminary research for the De Los story package on música Mexicana, I came across this 2011 article from the Texas Observer about a handful of Tejanos (Mexican Americans born in Texas) in the borderland region of the Rio Grande Valley griping that conjunto music was disappearing and losing its cultural relevancy. The culprit? Mexican immigrants who were listening to norteño.

“I’m not against Mexicans. I’m a Mexican. Well, Mexican American. But our music lost out because the Mexicans took over,” conjunto legend Pepe Maldonado told reporter Saul Elbein.

“The Mexicans don’t care nothing about our music,” Maldonado added. “They care about Monterrey style, Guanajuato style. They push their groups. They don’t care nothing about us locally. Not that I’m trying to be prejudiced about it; but they came and they worked cheaper than we did. So they took over the radio stations.”

While it’s true that conjunto and its younger cousin Tejano disappeared from radio stations across Texas at the turn of the millennium and were replaced by norteño and other variants of música Mexicana, it’s also true that conjunto and norteño are two sides of the same coin. Both genres are a fusion of European polkas (Czech and German) and Mexican rancheras that use the same instruments (the accordion, the bajo sexto and a drum kit), were developed in the same borderland region and are sung in Spanish. The key difference, if there is one, is that norteño is from south of the Rio Grande and conjunto is American.

“I listen to conjunto sometimes, and people ask me why I’m listening to that Mexican music,” Lupe Saenz, head of the South Texas Conjunto Assn., said to Elbeing. “Maybe it’s Spanish music; maybe it’s German music; maybe it’s rock ’n’ roll music. But it’s sure not Mexican music.”

For conjunto purists, norteño and the people who listened to it represented an existential threat to their culture, to their way of life.

That Texas Observer story was on my mind as I read this ProPublica report published last week that examined the resentment some immigrants felt toward newly arrived asylum-seekers, many of whom were granted driving licenses and work permits as their cases make their way through the system. In some instances, that animus resulted in direct support of Donald Trump.

“It’s not fair. Those of us who have been here for years get nothing,” Rosa, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who moved to Whitewater, Wisc., nearly 30 years ago, said of Nicaraguan asylum-seekers. She blamed Joe Biden and Democrats for not delivering on their promise of comprehensive immigration reform. Though Rosa couldn’t vote because of her immigration status — she asked the publication to identify by her first name to minimize the risk of deportation — two of her U.S.-born sons cast their ballot for Trump, whose biggest campaign promise was to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history.

Rosa, however, doesn’t think she is at risk.

“They know who has been behaving well and who hasn’t been,” she said of the incoming Trump administration, as if their plan is to make a list of who’s been naughty and nice.

Anti-immigrant sentiment among Latinos is not a new concept. Figures like civil rights attorney Gus Garcia and Cesar Chavez, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, believed that Mexican immigrants were a detriment to their respective causes. As Russell Contreras of Axios noted in November, Latinos being largely pro-immigrant in the ’90s and ’00s was the historical exception, not the rule.

The throughline behind the Texas Observer story and the ProPublica report is the same: There are many Latinos who believe that the presence of newly arrived immigrants takes something away from them, whether it be a work permit or their favorite music no longer being played on the radio. We might look and talk the same but they are not like us, the logic goes.

If you ask me, believing that others will be able to see the nuances and understand these distinctions we try to create is wishful thinking. For most people, conjunto and norteño are one and the same, completely indistinguishable from the other. They both sound Mexican. And though Rosa might believe that she’ll be spared, she could still very well be deported. It won’t matter if she thinks she’s one of the good ones, or that her kids voted for Trump.

(Jackie Rivera / For The Times; Martina Ibáñez-Baldor / Los Angeles Times)

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