I've been seeing that Fox News is making a big deal about Mexican flags being waved at the protests and exaggerating it beyond reason into a "Mexican Invasion." Having grown up in California, and 35 miles south of LA, let me explain why this is nonsense shouted by people who don't understand California, either it's history or culture. For some Californians, flying or displaying the Mexican flag is no different than folks from the South like Tennessee or Alabama displaying or flying the Confederate flag, a symbol of literal treason against the U.S.
California has a very different history from the Eastern half of the U.S. Its history wasn't shaped by the Civil War, the Reconstruction, or a lot of what happened east of the Mississippi. California was, at one time, a part of Mexico until it was annexed by the U.S. If you Google the demographics of California, it's 40% Hispanic, 37% White, and 15% Asian with other ethnicities such as Middle Eastern and African American rounding it out. There is no majority ethnicity there.
While there was a single Garrison there somewhere in California, it was otherwise uninvolved in the Civil War. Its history was defined by Spanish Missions, Mexican heritage, the Gold Rush, Vineyards, and heavy farming and ranching including the Citrus Groves in SoCal that Orange County was named for. Many Chinese immigrated to California in the mid eighteen hundreds. After Saigon fell in 1975, many, many Vietnamese immigrated to Southern California. When I was a kid growing up in SoCal, it was said that there were two hundred languages spoken on a daily basis in Orange Country alone, and at least sixty spoken in my high school. California, more than any other state in the Union, is truly a culture and civilization of immigrants. Most of its white residents were themselves immigrants to California in the 1800s, as prior to this, its population was made up entirely of Mexican and Native American peoples (and here Mexican means descended from the Mexica or Aztec peoples).
There is in LA and other parts of SoCal in particular, because of California's history, a nativist movement that still believes California is or should be Mexican. Their numbers are very few, and to be honestly, no one's ever really taken them seriously. But they, and others of Mexican descent there who aren't quite so delusional, whether citizen or immigrant, are still fiercely proud of their heritage. It shouldn't really surprise anyone that the ICE raids targeting Hispanic people in particular would have triggered them in such a way as was seen in Downtown LA. They see it, citizen or not, as a threat against themselves and their people, their tribe if you will. To what lengths would you go to protect your people and your family from being kidnapped and assaulted? The truth is, what should surprise people is the restraint they've shown so far.
No one in California wants any of this. Of this, I am absolutely certain. I guarantee you, everyone there just wants to live their lives in peace without having to worry about whether or not their mother, father, or child is just going to disappear at the agency of the Federal Government. There would have been no protests at all if ICE hadn't been conducting the raids in the belligerent way they have been. If they had come with warrants, if they had come in marked cars identifying themselves without masks, if they had only targeted actual violent criminals like they were supposed to, if they hadn't treated innocent people like animals, then there would have been no protests. There would have been no cars burning.
The blame for these protests and violence must lie squarely on the shoulders of those who conducted the raids, and those superiors who ordered them.
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