It’s Not Just About the Tacos

A guy walks into a TV studio. His name is Marco Gutierrez, founder of Latinos for Trump, and he is there to defend Donald Trump’s merciless immigrant-expulsion plan as tough but necessary, given what he knows about Mexicans.

“My culture is a very dominant culture,” he says on MSNBC, the day after Mr. Trump’s Aug. 31 immigration speech in Phoenix, “and it’s imposing and it’s causing problems. If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.”

Drugs, rape, murder, tacos: Leave it to the Trump crowd to frame the presidential race as a cultural death match. And leave it to Phoenix — border-state capital and overheated epicenter of the great American immigration freakout — to have gone down this road already, years ago.

Mr. Gutierrez, meet Salvador Reza.

Mr. Reza is an American of Mexican ancestry, a day-laborer organizer, military veteran and teacher, who has spent years in Phoenix being a thorn in the side of racist bureaucrats and law enforcement officials, especially Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the county’s Trump-supporting, serial immigrant abuser.

“People don’t know this,” Mr. Reza said, “but the precursor of all the anti-immigration laws in Arizona was the 1990s taco wars.”
More on the Taco Wars at link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/opinion/its-not-just-about-the-tacos.html?emc=edit_th_20160916&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=45299538&_r=0