Beto ORourke Built His Career on Driving Out Low-Income Mexican Communities
Beto O'Rourke looks up at the sky while surrounded by people
Democratic presidential candidate and former U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke speaks
to the media outside a youth migrant jail in Homestead, Florida, on June 27,
2019.
Eva Marie Uzcategui T. / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
By Susie Aquilina, Truthout Published August 28, 2019
In the aftermath of the El Paso, Texas, shooting that claimed the lives of
22 people and wounded 25 more, there is no question that white supremacist
extremism is boiling over the pot heated by centuries of anti-Mexican
violence.
For El Paso Latinos who have been grating under Trumps brutal rhetoric and
policies, there was something both shocking and familiar about the terror
that befell our city on one sweltering, desert summer day. We watched in
stunned horror as our city became the center of the same old narrative about
guns and video games.
Totally absent from this discourse, however, was the context of class
warfare that targets low-income Mexican communities for obliteration in El
Paso. Over the past three years, the ratcheting up of overt racism aimed at
people of Mexican origin is now culminating in bloodshed. But the ongoing
and systematic effort by bipartisan, wealthy interests to divest the
working-class people of El Paso of their resources, schools and homes
precedes Trump.
Organizing to Save El Paso Schools
During mid-summer of this year, Guillermo Glenn would have never expected
that, in a month, he would be saving those wounded by the white supremacist
shooter who targeted El Paso because of its high concentration of Latinos.
The overt racism of the Walmart tragedy is very clear, documented by a
hate-filled manifesto targeting Mexicans, Glenn said. But institutional
racism, which has historically plagued El Paso, is more difficult to
identify and define.
In the months leading up to the shooting, Glenn, a lifelong community
organizer who has been challenging white supremacy, was supporting Familias
Unidas del Chamizal, a group formed to fight the closure of the public
school attended by their children, Beall Elementary. The school sits a few
thousand feet from the border with Mexico and is the newest campus in the
South El Paso neighborhood, built many decades after its counterparts. Its
enrollment numbers were also the highest in this area, high enough to meet
the number of students required by the El Paso Independent School District
(EPISD) to remain open.
Parents of children attending Beall were therefore baffled as to why this
school, which is located in a residential zone and surrounded by
neighborhood amenities, was chosen for closure among others in the district.
Students would be forced to go to one of the two nearest schools, both
having lower enrollment numbers. One campus is feet from the international
highway which is packed daily with heavy traffic spewing large amounts of
pollution into the air, and the other school is located directly across the
street from an industrial waste facility that recycles trash, including
batteries, electronics and metals from Juárez, Mexico, and is not bound to
high standards of environmental regulation.
Beto ORourke is best remembered for his support to transform downtown by
driving out low-income residents and demolishing immigrant neighborhoods.
Residents of Barrio Chamizal, the neighborhood that Beall served, had
prevented the EPISD board from closing Beall for four years, and when the
board was finally able to do so, it was without any transparency or
accountability to the community.
Familias Unidas del Chamizal pursued board members and EPISD administrators
seeking redress for their frustration caused by the environmental racism
their children were to face by spending every day on a heavily polluted
campus. The board ignored their pleas and offered half-hearted explanations
that never addressed why they reached their decision to close the
neighborhoods newest, cleanest, most well-attended school. Throughout 2018
and much of 2019, Familias Unidas del Chamizal organized, protested and even
went on a hunger strike to pressure the board to overturn its ruling.
The institutional racism by the school board is expressed by dismantling
schools that had 97 percent immigrant children and moving them to unsafe,
environmentally questionable schools, Glenn said.
EPISD touts the closure of Beall as part of its Rightsizing for the Future
initiative. As seen in many cities throughout the United States, this
attempt to rebrand the defunding of public education is a means to divest
low-income communities of essential, much-needed resources while attempting
to slap a practical and efficient face on the insidious practice.
Such policies reduce the number of schools and teachers, encourage hiring
freezes and diminish teachers rights by heightening their disposability.
These policies also overstuff classrooms with unwieldy student-to-teacher
ratios, and promote charterization and privatization. It is working-class
people and communities of color who bear the brunt of these policies.
Perhaps just as troubling as the larger national agenda to abolish public
education is the broader context of gentrification out of which the decision
to eliminate Beall from Barrio Chamizal emerged. The boards ruling
coincides with work that city leaders have been doing for years to expel the
neighborhoods working poor.
Barrio Chamizal boasts one of the highest concentrations of immigrant
residents in the country, and its members also suffer from the most severe
levels of poverty. Since at least 2016, urban planners and the Housing
Authority of the City of El Paso have been working to revitalize the area
by closing historic housing projects and forcing low-income Mexicans out of
the barrio by raising property values. Of course, the so-called benevolent
intention of cleaning up the neighborhood is the stated reason for these
efforts, but the outcome would fundamentally be the erasure an entire
community.
Fighting for El Paso Neighborhoods
Barrio Chamizal is not the only neighborhood facing destruction by powerful
interests in El Paso. Duranguito, a historic neighborhood roughly two miles
southwest of Beall, was put on the chopping block when city leaders and
wealthy developers put forth a plan to build a massive arena in downtown El
Paso in 2016.
The arena was the latest in a decades-long endeavor to gentrify the citys
downtown, one that involved current democratic presidential candidate Rep.
Beto ORourke in its early stages. Long before his Senate run against Ted
Cruz that earned him national acclaim, ORourkes first political gig was
sitting on the El Paso City Council. To local activists, he is best
remembered for his support to transform the citys downtown by driving out
low-income residents and demolishing traditionally immigrant neighborhoods.
In 2006, El Paso millionaire and real estate developer Bill Sanders
spearheaded the campaign to evict thousands of mostly elderly people of
Mexican origin who had made the downtown area their home after immigrating
to the U.S. a generation ago, in order to replace the barrio with an
entertainment and retail district.
Despite being married to Sanderss daughter, ORourke refused to recuse
himself from a city council vote in 2008 that would allow the use of eminent
domain in forcing these residents from their homes to allow the downtown
redevelopment plan to be realized. For years, a battle ensued between El
Pasos wealthy business class and the working-class Latinos of the citys
downtown, and throughout this struggle, ORourke stood firmly on the side of
El Pasos mostly white elites. For those familiar with this story, it is
hard to perceive ORourkes staunch opposition to the use of eminent domain
for the border wall as anything but disingenuous.
ORourkes political career epitomizes how the right-wing elements of the
Democratic Party have failed Latinos.
ORourke represents the run-of-the-mill milquetoast centrism that drives the
Democratic Party, as he ran for Congress on cuts to Social Security, voted
to fast-track negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership once in the
House, and waffled on Medicare for All in his more recent campaigns for
higher office. But whats especially interesting about his political career
is how, from its beginning, it epitomizes how the right-wing elements of the
Democratic Party have failed Latinos.
On the one hand, neoliberal rhetoric on immigration is certainly more humane
when put up against that of Republicans. But when it comes to how policies
impact people of Mexican origin on the ground, there are minute differences
at best between the two major parties. For example, ORourke has a markedly
conservative congressional voting record in which he even supported a law
put forth by the Trump administration that eliminated screening requirements
for hiring Customs and Border Protection officers.
The Future for Latinos Under Bipartisan Racism
If the trajectory of ORourkes political career is any indication of what
kind of president he would be, his candidacy doesnt bode well for
low-income Latinos. While he has made immigration and issues facing the
border his bailiwick, it is unclear how his policies would deviate from the
Obama administration that contributed to the widespread criminalization and
deportation of immigrants.
The fascistic policies of the Trump administration regarding immigration are
undoubtedly an amplification of what previous administrations have done, but
they are by no means a deviation. For Latinos in the borderlands now facing
incarceration and violence at the hands of the anti-immigrant maelstrom that
has loomed for generations, it brings little hope that a presidential
candidate from El Paso built his career by supporting efforts to eradicate
low-income Mexican communities from the city that he so publicly venerates.
When genocide takes the form of mass murder, it is obvious and easy to name.
For a politician to assume a very vocal opposition to that slaughter and the
rhetoric that brought it on is a low bar in the fight against white
supremacy.
The annihilation of poor Latinos from El Paso is, unfortunately, nearly as
old as the city itself, as practically every generation has seen similar
struggles played out over the past century. Violence against the citys
Mexicans has come in many forms the divestment of resources, expulsion
from homes, deportation, internment and now, racially motivated killing.
The recent shooting is simply the latest in the continual onslaught that
low-income people of color have experienced throughout El Pasos history.
Whats more, it was brought on by words and policies that are certainly an
exaggeration of what has come before but are by no means an aberration.
If Democrats hope to fight the Trump administrations brutal policies, they
would do well to atone for their own history and understand the relationship
that white supremacy has with class warfare. It has not been racist rhetoric
alone that has gotten us to this point, and it will take a lot more than
condemnation of hateful words to improve the conditions of Latinos in years
to come.
