Politico Magazine (Opinion)
By Gustavo Arellano
July 8, 2015
Demonizing
Mexicans as rapists is a time-honored tradition of American letters and
politics. The idea that hombres are fundamentally devious perverts
hell-bent on violating
the honor of white and Mexican women alike is soldered on the American
psyche—even though it’s based on goddamn lies.
This
canard gained national prominence recently when Donald Trump angered
any American with a soul after saying, “When Mexico sends its people,
they're not sending their
best...They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're
rapists.” But his stereotyping of Mexicans as sexual predators wasn’t
original. Ann Coulter boasted on Twitter “all that spicy stuff about
Mexican rape culture came from” her giving Trump an advance
copy of her book, ¡Adiós, America! And she wasn’t even the first
unfunny blonde to trot out that tired line: in 2013,
comedienne-of-the-moment Amy Schumer joked, “I used to date Hispanic
guys, but now I prefer consensual.”
The
three were late to the raza rape game, though, one long led by members
of the House of Representatives. In 2007, Dana Rohrabacher, the
whack-job representative from
Orange County who once supported the Taliban (you can look it up!),
stated from the floor of Congress, “If you get raped or murdered or run
over by a drunk in California in my area, it’s likely it’s been done by
someone who should never have been there legally
in the first place”—code for the Mexican immigrants who live in his
district. The year before, Texas congressman Ted Poe told his colleagues
“illegals in this country contribute a vast over-percentage of violent
crime and street crime, from theft to rape to
murder.” That same year Iowa Congressman Steve King perversely
celebrated Cinco de Mayo by writing in a newsletter that if undocumented
immigrants weren’t in the U.S., “Eight American children [a day] would
not suffer the horror as a victim of a sex crime.”
Given those race-baiting comments, it’s no surprise that King recently
came out in support of Trump, saying he “appreciates [his] scrappiness.”
Latinos
can—and better—rage at the cheap political points earned by sliming
Mexicans with the rapist stereotype. And the best way to do it is with
the truth: A 2011 U.S.
Government Accountability Office study “Criminal Alien Statistics:
Information on Incarcerations, Arrests and Costs” found that of the
three million arrests of immigrants, legal or not, examined by
investigators, only two percent were for sex offenses—two
percent too many, but hardly an epidemic. It didn’t break down the
ethnicity or legal status of the offenders, but the Bureau of Justice
Statistics’ (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey breaks down such
stats by victims. For 2013 (the most recent year
available), it shows that whites accounted for 71 percent of all sexual
assaults documented (above their total percentage of 63 percent of the
U.S. population), while Latinos accounted for 9 percent, far below their
total percentage of 17 percent. And as a
percentage of all “serious violent victimizations,” sexual assaults
represent 11 percent of the violent crimes against Latinos. For
gabachos? 18 percent. The BJS also noted that for the period from
2005-2010 about 66 percent of sexual assault victims knew
their perp, and that whites had strangers commit violent victimizations
against them at a rate of 9.2 per 1,000 people, compared to 9.8 per
1,000 for Latinos—so much for the notion of an army of faceless Mexicans
stalking their fair-skinned prey.
For
those who don’t comprende: white American citizens are far more rape-y
than Mexicans can ever hope to become. Yet the lies about hordes of
Mexican rapists perpetuated
by Trump, Coulter and Schumer and so many others persist because
they’re just engaging in good ol’ American paranoia about purity and the
perpetual menace south of the border.
In
Mexicans, Americans have a group of people on which to project their
racial fears for the future. Congressman John C. Box said it best in
1930 when he told the House
Immigration and Naturalization Committee, “No other alien race entering
America provides an easier channel for the intermixture of blood than
does the mongrel Mexican…their presence and intermarriage with both
white and black races…create the most insidious
and general mixture of white, Indian and negro blood strains ever
produced in America.”
This
race-mixing and horniness was already on the minds of Americans in
their earliest encounters with Mexicans. Popular lore maintains the
Texas rebels beat General Santa
Anna in the Battle of San Jacinto because he was having sex with a
captive African-American woman right before the battle. In The Prairie
Scout; or, Agatone the Renegade. A Romance of Border Life, Charles
Webber in 1852 wrote that Mexican women are “more loose
and licentious than the men. It is not all astonishing, therefore, that
the race should be so miserably degenerate.” C.E. Rodgers, in his 1881
Secret Sins of Societies, seemed to take pity on the indigenous that
Cortés conquered by saying the “lecherous bigots...overran
[Mexico] with a flood of Spanish cruelty and immorality like a stream
of lava." But that just meant for the author that modern-day Mexicans
possessed a "licentious selfishness and reckless cruelty.”
From
shoddy social analysis and travelogues, the Mexi-molester meme jumped
into popular culture. On the literary side, everyone from O. Henry to
Zane Grey featured dirty
Mexicans ready to deflower damsels Spanish and Saxon. Silent films in
the 1910s, with telling titles like The Girl and the Greaser, The
Greaser’s Gauntlet and Tony the Greaser set the template for the sweaty
banditos that made the careers of early Western
stars like Broncho Billy Anderson and Tom Mix. Those two-reelers, in
turn, influenced Hollywood’s depiction of Mexicans for the rest of the
20th century, from the sex-crazed mobs of Orson Welles Touch of Evil
looking to pervert the muy gabacha Janet Leigh
to the bandits in ¡Three Amigos! who kidnap a gringo-loving señorita.
Hell, even the name of Speedy Gonzalez, that most beloved Mexican icon
of Old Hollywood, according to Chicano cultural critic William Anthony
Nericcio in his fabulous examination of Mexican
stereotypes, Tex{t}-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in
America, is based on a crude joke that involved a Mexican man afflicted
with premature ejaculation.
All
these fictional depictions set the stage for the rest of America to
expect nothing but a fiesta of vice and defilement once Mexicans become
their neighbors. And that
panic makes it easy for pendejos to appeal to the darker side of the
American mind in their endless quest for votes, sales and notoriety. I
don’t see this myth going away any time soon, alas, but there is hope.
The nationwide scorn for Trump at least tells
us we’re on a road where polite society won’t take it anymore without
massive protests and pushback. May Trump, Coulter, Schumer and anyone
spewing such crap soon fester alongside the Confederate flag, Lou Dobbs
and Chi Chi’s in this nation’s scrap heap of
racial ideas more expired than days-old guacamole.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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