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Trump Is Awakening a Sleeping Giant [1]
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Date: 2025-06-08
Fifty-seven years ago, starting on March 5, 1968, thousands of Mexican American high-school students walked out of classes in Los Angeles protesting inequality in the public education system.
In the backdrop of a tumultuous time, the significance of this event — the first major mass protest against racism undertaken by Mexican Americans in the history of the United States — is often lost to history.
However, the 1968 walkouts set in motion a transformation that bears greatly on the rapidly evolving June 2025 events in Los Angeles. As he orders the US military onto the streets of Los Angeles to enforce DHS workplace raids, Trump is awakening a sleeping giant.
Some brief history.
That same year, 1968, the Vietnam War was in full swing, headlined by the massive political impact of the January Tet Offensive by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. In April, Martin Luther King, Jr., would be assassinated. In June, RFK would meet the same fate. In November, Republican Richard M. Nixon would be elected as President, accelerating the political demise of the Democratic Party in the South that had begun during passage of the Civil Rights Acts.
The day before the Mexican American student walkouts, FBI Director Hoover had urged local law enforcement to prioritize "political intelligence work to prevent the development of nationalist movements in minority communities". At the time, the local Los Angeles political system remained under white majority control, led by Democratic Mayor Sam Yorty, a politician with a long and complex history who had transitioned from a New Dealer into someone who would later endorse Nixon and Reagan. To give the flavor of Yorty, when he ran successfully for reelection against Tom Bradley in 1969, he painted his opponent as a “dangerous radical, alternately of the black power or Communist revolutionary varieties” (Bradley, who would later win election as the first African American mayor of LA, had spent much of his career in the Los Angeles Police Department — the LAPD). At the state level, California was under newly elected Republican Governor Ronald Reagan.
Los Angeles had a long history of violent repression of Mexican Americans. Local history featured episodes like the WW2 era “Zoot Suit” riots in 1943 where American servicemen in LA and other US cities rampaged and beat Mexican American youths, and the 1951 “Bloody Christmas” LAPD beatings of jail inmates. During the Great Depression, in the early 1930s, the United States deported between 500,000 and 2 million people of Mexican descent (including 1.2 million children who were U.S. citizens) during what was called “the Mexican Repatriation.” Many of these deportees were from Southern California.
In sum, March 1968 was a very rough time for young Mexican American high school students in Los Angeles to carry out a mass walkout. But the movement was a volcano ready to erupt. So out they went. Thousands and thousands of them. Linked to parallel political developments like the 1962 birth of the United Farm Workers, it was the flowering of what would be called the Chicano Movement.
Fast forward to 2025. In the years following that era, some progress was made. Notably, Mexican Americans began to run and win races for local elections. The LAPD became more integrated. And school curriculums were improved. Today, one of California’s two US Senators is Mexican American and a significant number of California House seats are held by Latinos as well. It is also notable that, since the 1960’s, the Latino population itself has become very diverse, including many Latinos from Central and South America.
As a Mexican American myself, and a native of Los Angeles, my jaw dropped when I saw that Trump was ordering troops onto the streets of LA. Did he not know this history? Did he not understand the depth of memory?
Yes, Mexican Americans, like all people, support fighting crime. And the relationships between legal and undocumented residents can be complex.
But now it is clear to a much wider audience, beyond the immigrant rights activist core (which knew from the start this was likely where things were headed), that this was never about “violent criminals.” This is about returning Mexican Americans, and Latinos and other immigrants, to the dark days of “the great repatriation.” This is about promoting violent right-wing fantasies.
It is evidence of the cluelessness of Trump’s minions, particularly Steven Miller, that they think they will be able to intimidate millions in Los Angeles. Trump’s MAGA keyboard warriors and podcasters — whose level of understanding of Los Angeles and its history is at the John Birch Society comic book level — are in for a rude surprise.
The National Guard deployment will not help them — quite the reverse. It will instead mobilize a lot of people who would otherwise be inclined to support fair law enforcement but now instead see a fascist movement rearing its head. And it will trigger a deep well of civil resistance, particularly from Mexican Americans.
The virtual-reality-driven right-wing movement is about to get a taste of reality-reality.
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