Donald Trump is waging struggle on California the best way Rome did on Carthage.
He ordered the Nationwide Guard and the Marines to occupy components of Los Angeles, over the objections of Gov. Gavin “Newscum” and Mayor Karen Bass. He’s demanding that my alma mater, UCLA, pay a $1-billion wonderful over allegations of antisemitism. His Justice Division has sued the state on points together with transgender athletes, big-rig emission requirements and cage-free eggs.
Now, Trump goes after our historical past.
Final month, the White Home issued a information launch titled “President Trump Is Proper In regards to the Smithsonian,” flagging a seize bag of museum reveals as offensive — mainly something that highlights racism or is sympathetic towards LGBTQ+ folks and undocumented immigrants.
Buried on this trash heap of whines is a criticism that displays how hell-bent Trump is on bending California to his will.
Describing a “Californio” household as dropping their land to Anglo “squatters,” which the yet-to-be-built Nationwide Museum of the American Latino does on its web site, is seemingly a DEI thought crime, in accordance with the information launch.
My question to the White Home, asking what precisely is so offensive about this characterization of the Mexicans who stayed in California after it turned a part of the U.S., was acknowledged but not answered.
However the deal with “Californio” and “squatter” — and placing these phrases in quotes, because the information launch did — suggests the underlying subject, stated UC Santa Barbara historical past professor Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, who focuses on nineteenth century California.
“They’re attempting to query the legitimacy” of the Californios, she stated. “Who issues as an American? [To Trump], it’s not individuals who come from Mexico. It’s individuals who got here from the East.”
“The extent of trivia on this — it’s not him,” she added of Trump. “He’s not a reader. It have to be an enormous group doing this.”
Worrying about scare quotes round two phrases in a White Home information launch would possibly seem to be distracting piffle in contrast with Trump’s different anti-California volleys.
However how the U.S. authorities frames our yesteryear is considered one of this administration’s essential battlefronts and one thing I’ve repeatedly warned about in my columna. Historical past is written by the victors, goes the cliche, permitting them to form a folks’s sense of self and resolve who’s essential and who isn’t.
That’s why Trump and his goons have tried to remake our nation’s previous as a triumphalist, so-called Heritage American story, wherein folks of Western European heritage are at all times the primary actors and the heroes. They’ve carried out it with the obsession of a pharaoh chipping away all mentions of his predecessors from obelisks.
Trump’s marketing campaign began on Inauguration Day, when he signed an government order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Secretary of Protection Pete Hegseth has eliminated the identify of LGBTQ+ hero Harvey Milk from a Navy ship and restored the names of Military bases that had honored Accomplice officers. The Division of Homeland Safety retains posting photographs and paintings that commemorate Manifest Future — the concept that white folks, and white folks alone, saved this savage continent.
Subsequent up: a assessment of reveals at nationwide memorials and monuments to make sure they don’t “inappropriately disparage People previous or dwelling,” an “extraordinary celebration” for this nation’s 250th birthday and a Nationwide Backyard of American Heroes to “mirror the superior splendor of our nation’s timeless exceptionalism.”
In Trump’s thoughts, america has by no means carried out any unsuitable, and anybody who thinks so hates this nation. It’s not shocking that casting Californios as victims of rapacious gringos would possibly offend him or his lackeys. However this isn’t wokoso propaganda — it’s well-documented historical past.
Pio Pico State Historic Park in Whittier was dwelling to its namesake, the final governor of California when it was a part of Mexico.
(Ringo Chiu / For The Instances)
In 1850, Sacramento’s sheriff and mayor died whereas trying to take away white squatters, in what was shortly deemed the Squatter Riot. The next yr, the U.S. authorities pressured Californios to show they owned the land they lived on, regardless that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American Struggle, had ensured their property rights. Within the meantime, white settlers might largely declare rancho land as they happy.
California’s most well-known historians — Hubert Howe Bancroft, Kevin Starr and Robert Glass Cleland, to call a couple of — wrote extensively about so-called squatterism, with Bancroft describing what occurred to the Californios as “oppressive and ruinous.”
A brand new technology of students has targeted on the writings of Californios, together with “The Squatter and the Don,” an 1885 novel by María Ruiz de Burton based mostly on her household’s combat to maintain their rancho in what’s now San Diego County.
This was the e-book described on the Nationwide Museum of the American Latino web site, prompting the ignominious “Californio” point out within the White Home information launch.
Till now, “there’s by no means been a lot opposition, actually” to the narrative of the Californios’ decline, Chavez-Garcia stated, calling it “foundational” to the state’s mythology. She cited festivals in mission cities, similar to Santa Barbara’s Outdated Spanish Days Fiesta, the place folks costume up just like the Californios of yore to recollect a romanticized period that was destined to finish badly.
“The considering was that the state’s prosperity was by no means meant to occur” to Californios, she stated. “They had been meant to die off.”
As a highschool pupil in San José, Chavez-Garcia knew none of this historical past — “we discovered extra in regards to the Homestead Act within the Midwest,” she joked. At UCLA, when she lastly discovered in regards to the Californios, she was “outraged” and questioned why her beloved highschool historical past trainer “didn’t educate us this primary factor.”
“Many individuals … don’t know our historical past, so no matter the federal government tells them to learn, they’re going to simply accept,” she stated. “You may’t simply let somebody take an eraser and erase these histories willy-nilly lo que no le gusta [what someone doesn’t like] after which put in regardless of the hell you need as a result of it makes you’re feeling good.”
It could possibly’t fall solely on students similar to Chavez-Garcia and nerds similar to me to push again towards Trump’s ahistorical assault. All Californians want to face as much as individuals who not solely need to stay willfully ignorant in regards to the unhealthy components of our historical past but in addition need to cease others from studying about them. Talking solely in regards to the good prevents us from doing higher and results in a juvenile worldview that’s sadly taken maintain within the White Home and past.
We should take the stance expressed by Doña Josefa Alamar, a protagonist of “The Squatter and the Don.”
On the finish of the novel, she resides in exile in San Francisco. Her husband has died from the stress of attempting to maintain their rancho, her sons stay in hardship and her daughter is married to a white man. A good friend urges her to remain silent and never malign the “wealthy folks” who triggered her a lot grief. However Doña Josefa refuses.
“Let the responsible rejoice and go unpunished, and the harmless endure wreck and desolation,” she replies. “I slander nobody, however shall communicate the reality.”
