The struggle for Los Angeles, Mexico

On Monday, July 7, Los Angeles Consul General Carlos González Gutiérrez is about to begin his once-weekly Audiencia Pública When he heard a helicopter flying overhead. As usual he began to greet about twenty or twenty-five community members who showed up on the third and busiest floors of the consulate, sharing their concerns and asking questions. Today, they almost all want to discuss immigration attacks in cities and what consulates can do to protect Mexican citizens. As the party progressed, González Gutiérrez heard loud noises and general commotion outside on the helicopter. He kept chatting, standing in front of the Mexican flag and a bright orange wall with the official Mexican seal.

After the incident, his deputy consul general approached him and raised his phone, which was playing a video of beige military trucks, federal officers riding horses, protesters yelling, and mayor Karen Bass said the officers needed to leave. González Gutiérrez realized that the melee was in MacArthur Park, directly opposite the consulate. He returned to the microphone he used to use Auditory And said an immigration raid was taking place. He didn’t want to cause panic, but he invited everyone in the building to stay there, and everyone outside (people lined up for their dates, vendors selling food and Mexican flags) to come in. He told them they would be safe. Under international law, the consulate is inviolable, and it is a shelter in the city of Los Angeles.

While the Federal Agents were still in the park, González Gutiérrez returned to his office on the fifth floor, where the walls of windows provided the best vantage point for watching what was happening on the street below. The news team was on site and broadcast it to audiences across the country. Too Radicalswho has been trying to record every raid and has been posting videos and photos on social media.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested hundreds of Mexicans in Los Angeles in recent weeks, but there was no one in MacArthur Park that day, suggesting its existence was a demonstration of force. Federal agents announced that they left shortly after the mayor’s bass arrived. He told me that González Gutiérrez found the whole plot “stunning”. “I never thought of witnessing the same actions as everyone saw at MacArthur Park, because what MacArthur Park represents is because of the representatives of Los Angeles, and because of the Border Patrol deployed troops.”

González Gutiérrez, born in Mexico City, spent 28 years in the United States. After graduating from El Colegio de México and earning a degree in international relations, he attended the Foreign Service Academy for aspiring diplomats in Mexico, which he must attend. While he was there, he obtained permission from the Department of Foreign Affairs to take the Postgraduate Program in International Relations at the University of Southern California, where he studied with Abe Lowenthal, an American-Ratine American relations expert. That year was 1988. The Dodgers beat Oakland track and field in the World Series. González Gutiérrez became a fan of the city and its baseball team.

Lowenthal gave him advice, shaping the rest of his career, González Gutiérrez told me. “If I were you, I would do my best to focus my career on the Mexican community in the United States.” Conflicts in Central America, the power of peso, the severity of drug trafficking: All of this will fluctuate over time, Lovental predicted. However, the Mexican community in the United States will always be at the top of Mexico’s foreign policy priorities. This is almost the case with the development of the incident.

When González Gutiérrez finished at USC, he returned to Mexico City to complete the program at Matías Romero and became a junior foreign service officer. Soon he received a call from Foreign Secretary Fernando Solana Morales who told him that Lowenthal was interested in getting him to continue his research project on the link between California and Mexico, so he would return to Los Angeles to help his former professor and become the first consul for community affairs. González Gutiérrez also believes he was sent to Los Angeles because the United States and Mexico are negotiating with the North American Free Trade Agreement: The Foreign Ministry knows that Mexico needs to establish a consular network in the United States. González Gutiérrez hangs a souvenir on the wall of his office, as well as a painting of the struggle and photographs of us and Mexican VIPs: Avoiding the phenomenon Tickets for the perfect match thrown by Fernando Valenzuela, from Etchohuaquila, sonora, sonora, sonora, sonora, sonora, sonora, 1990, a left-handed screwball pitcher. Valenzuela signed him.

During this time in Los Angeles, González Gutiérrez told me: “You can see how important Mexican communities will become to the social structure of the city. But it’s not like it.” In November 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which included a so-called amnesty provision that provided citizenship for undocumented people, including Mexicans. Nearly two million Mexicans have gained legal status due to the IRCA, including more than 5 million in Los Angeles County. By the mid-nineties, the population of Mexico in Greater Los Angeles was estimated to be 4 million, making it The largest external MEXICO.

The new immigration laws have made many Mexicans feel more stable in their position in Los Angeles, allowing them to settle down. As 2011 Report USC researchers explained that Mexicans arrived in the late 1970s and early 1980s and applied for legalization through IRCA regulations, accounting for an increasing share of the Los Angeles workforce, graduated with higher Mexican immigrants than early Mexican immigrants, bought higher and higher homes with more Mexican immigrants, and had higher medians.

According to González Gutiérrez ice Raid. Their American-born children and grandchildren are leading the resistance to the review. He told me: “They are the ones who protested against protecting parents and waving the Mexican flag to honor their identities.”

A few years after signing the IRCA, González Gutiérrez witnessed the riot caused by the assault by Rodney King. He recalled the racial tensions during this period, including those between African Americans and Mexican and Central American immigrants who recently moved to central South-Central South. From the Mexican consulate, he said, he could see “fires everywhere, five to six columns of smoke rising into the sky at the same time.” González Gutiérrez also witnessed the campaign, passing Proposition 187 in 1994, a voting initiative aimed at cutting public interest and providing benefits to undocumented immigrants. (The measure made a lot of profits – almost 60% of voters supported it – but was blocked by federal judges.) October 16, 1994, Los Angeles, Los Angeles era Photos of protests against the ballot initiative were launched, showing Cesar Chavez Avenue, named after the co-founder of the United Farm Workers Union, filled with Mexico flags flying from Angelenos. Thirty years after the photo was published, González Gutiérrez held a ceremony at the consulate where he unveiled a large frame reprint. He said the anniversary was special for him because it marked a dramatic turn in California: “One is the vanguard of the anti-immigration movement, and has become the vanguard of the pro-migration movement in the United States.”