If you are protesting and rioting to remain in the United States, why wave a Mexican flag?
That’s the question frequently being asked as Los Angeles continues to be wracked by violent protests that began in opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Southern California.
As many have noted, it’s probably not the best look for any protest group demanding to remain in America to wave the flag of a foreign country.
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But the reality is that the mass Mexican flag-waving isn’t just a PR blunder. They aren’t just waving those flags because they don’t want to be deported back to Mexico. The message they are sending is often not even pro-immigration, but bizarrely nativist.
Here’s a protester making an animated case that Los Angeles is actually “Mexican.”
Mexico’s Senate president made a somewhat more measured argument that Los Angeles and the American Southwest should be a part of Mexico.
Even the noted public intellectual and acclaimed astronaut Katy Perry took to social media to exclaim how Los Angeles was “founded by Mexican settlers in 1781” and that it was “Mexican land.”
That’s curious since Mexico didn’t exist until 1821 when it declared independence from Spain.
This is all reflective of a viewpoint that’s common in California and south of the border. They don’t want to go back to Mexico; they want California to be Mexico or perhaps become part of some kind of larger ethnostate based on Aztlan — the mythical nation of the Aztecs.
This general ethos about California being Mexican land goes by many names, though it’s often referred to as “La Reconquista.” The idea being that Mexicans and Latin Americans have an Indigenous right to California and other Western states annexed during the Mexican-American War. They have a right to take it back, the thinking goes.
It’s in part an ethnic solidarity movement that’s often been fused with socialist or Marxist ideology.
Take, for instance, Ron Gochez, one of the prominent organizers of the LA protests. As prominent X user “DataRepublican” posted, Gochez is a “self-proclaimed revolutionary who called for a revolution to take land back from ‘white racist people.’”
Gochez is not just a community organizer; he is a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District who quite openly pushes far-left ideas in his classrooms. He’s also a member of the Union del Barrio, a Marxist revolutionary group. Gochez was interviewed by Democracy Now! about the LA protests, and he said that this is “ancestral land” of “Indigenous people” that was unjustly taken by the United States.
“For us as Indigenous people to these lands, to this continent, this is nothing new,” Gochez said to Democracy Now! “The military going after us is nothing new. The United States in this part of the country is the result of a military invasion of Mexico.”
The Daily Signal reached out to Union del Barrio about Gochez’s views, but they didn’t respond.
It’s true that the U.S. did acquire California and other Western states during the Mexican-American War, which was domestically quite controversial. But it wasn’t so simple as the U.S. just taking land because it could. There were genuine border disputes between the countries after the U.S. annexed Texas, which had already rebelled and declared independence from the dysfunctional Mexican government.
Mexico was in deep financial distress, had withheld debt payments to American citizens, and had outright defaulted in many cases. The U.S. actually paid for the states it acquired from Mexico after winning the war, and in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo even agreed to pay the debts they owed American citizens.
Mexico continued to spiral into financial chaos after the war. In fact, several European countries militarily intervened in Mexico during the 19th century to get Mexico to pay what it owed.
The bottom line is that Mexico has been politically troubled since it gained independent from Spain. On that note, if Mexico — a country that controlled what is now the U.S. part of the Southwest for 20 years — has some kind of timeless claim to California, why doesn’t Spain have a claim to all of Mexico?
As Substack writer Chad Crowley noted, Mexico’s claim to California is shallow, at best.
“California was never Mexican in any meaningful civilizational or ethnonational sense,” Crowley noted. “It existed as a peripheral holding of the Spanish Empire, a distant and neglected frontier governed less by law than by the limitations of geography. A sparse network of missions, presidios, and tenuous coastal settlements took shape in the late 18th century, but the interior remained tribal, unincorporated, and largely untouched.”
The idea that the U.S. should now suddenly give it up is preposterous. People don’t have the right to break U.S. immigration laws or riot based on some tenuous ethnic land claims. Mexico doesn’t have the right to U.S. land because it lost a war over 150 years ago. Land, again, that we paid for.
The Reconquista types are demanding that the United States become what many chose with their feet to leave. And that gets to the absurdity of their demands. Perhaps Mexico’s problem wasn’t that it lost land to the United States but that the whole country wasn’t annexed at the end of the war.
One way or another, it’s a ridiculous argument. California doesn’t belong to Mexico. Foreign nationals don’t have a right to stay in the United States. Most Americans, including self-described Latinos, don’t want to live in a lawless Marxist ethno-state. They want order to be restored, the border to be secured, lawbreakers to be deported, and cartels to be eradicated.
Originally published at The Daily Signal.
Jarrett Stepman is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of History podcast. He is also the author of the book The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.
