By Aldo Mena
I would like to preface my comments by sincerely thanking Linda Estrada for bringing appointed Judge Linda Perez’s attendance at a Trump rally in 2019 to the attention of the Mexican American voters of El Paso. I’d also like to acknowledge Emmanuel Rivas Valenzuela for reporting on this development in the race for the El Paso County Criminal Court of Law #1. I am grateful that at least one local reporter was willing to take a closer look into this particular Democratic primary race.
For the sake of exposition, I should probably start by mentioning that Judge Perez was initially appointed by the El Paso County Commissioners Court in December of 2023 to fill the vacated judicial seat of the El Paso County Criminal Court of Law #1. As noted in an article by Rivas Valenzuela published in El Paso Matters, Estrada, who unsuccessfully challenged Perez for the seat in the recent Democratic primary, circulated a campaign mailer in February featuring a picture of Perez at the Trump rally held in El Paso in 2019. The photo in question, which had also been posted to Estrada’s official campaign Facebook page, shows Perez being embraced by a man identified in the article as Leonardo Maldonado. In the photo, Maldonado, who is apparently Perez’s campaign treasurer, is seen wearing the tacky red “Make America Great Again” cap that is reviled by many Mexican Americans throughout the Southwest as the quintessential symbol of Trumpism.
At one point in the article, Estrada alludes to Trump’s well-established hostility towards Mexico as a cause for concern for El Pasoans given ‘our close proximity to Mexico.’ Allow me to wholeheartedly agree with Estrada that El Pasoans, especially Mexican Americans, should be concerned about Trump’s hostility towards Mexico. A comprehensive review of the litany of Trump’s aggressions toward Mexico, verbal and otherwise, is beyond the scope of this particular article. However, as Mexican Americans, we should never forget that Trump launched his first presidential bid by calling Mexicans “rapists” and “criminals,” and that he would go on to propose, among other things, building a border wall that he would somehow force Mexico to pay for. Trump’s “great wall” was never built and, of course, Mexico never paid for it, but it endures, in a metaphorical sense, as a symbol of the anti-Mexican sentiment at the core of Trumpism.
It’s also worth mentioning that while he was still in office, Trump seemed fixated on taking some type of unilateral military action against Mexico, and, at one point, even seriously inquired about the possibility of firing missiles into Mexico, according to his defense secretary, Mark Esper. More recently, according to a Rolling Stone article, Trump tasked his policy advisors with drawing up “battle plans” for attacking Mexico and, if elected again, has vowed to conduct some type of military action in Mexico with or without the Mexican government’s approval and cooperation.
Evan Osnos of The New Yorker aptly referred to Trump as the most “anti-Mexican candidate” in modern American history. But, it was perhaps Jorge Castañeda, Mexico’s former foreign minister and current NYU professor, who most effectively summed up the nature of Trump’s hostility to Mexico when he noted that for the first time since “Ronald Reagan assailed the Soviet Union in 1980, an American presidential candidate actively campaigned against another country’s national interests.” In this case, however, the country was not a bitter Cold War adversary of the United States. It was Mexico, the United States’ second-largest export market and a perennial American ally.
And, while I wholeheartedly agree with Estrada that El Pasoans should be concerned about Trump’s unrelenting hostility towards Mexico, I would also like to take this opportunity to address the persistent misconception that Trump has solely targeted Mexico and Mexican immigrants. It should be clearly acknowledged that Trump has also regularly targeted Mexican Americans. There’s the time, for example, when Trump unceremoniously kicked Jorge Ramos, a prominent Mexican American reporter, out of a press conference. And then there was the time that Trump repeatedly maligned a Mexican American federal judge named Gonzalo Curiel. According to Trump, the accomplished jurist was unfit to preside over the set of civil fraud lawsuits related to Trump’s so-called “university” due to his “Mexican heritage” and “pro-Mexico” political positions. In a clumsy attempt to explain the logic behind this insulting assertion, Trump acknowledged that many of his policy proposals including the border wall, were designed to antagonize someone of “Mexican heritage” like Judge Curiel, and that, therefore, at least according to Trump, the fact that a Mexican American was presiding over the case constituted an “absolute conflict” of interest.
Trump’s most insidious attack on the Mexican American community, however, has come in the form of his consistent endorsement of the great replacement theory, a staple of white supremacist ideology, which, at least under one early version of the antisemitic conspiracy theory, characterizes the large populations of Mexican Americans residing throughout the Southwest as the culmination of an “invasion” orchestrated by Jewish elites to subvert the political will of those who Trump refers to as the “actual American” voters. To this day, we continue to hear the “invasion” rhetoric associated with the theory repeatedly laced into statements by Trump and his ideological confederates including the likes of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and even Patrick Crusius, the Walmart shooter.
Those of us who have been paying attention and have seen the proverbial forest, so to speak, know that we ignore the larger threat posed by Trumpism to our particular community at our own peril. Given the gravity of this threat, it really shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that many Mexican Americans harbor a deep-seated hostility to Trump and are committed to confronting Trumpism whenever and wherever we encounter it. And, given the “bad blood” that exists between Mexican Americans and Trump, it certainly isn’t unreasonable under the circumstances, with all due respect to Judge Perez, for Mexican Americans in particular to expect some type of clarification regarding her position and attitude toward Trump and Trumpism.
I’d like to make it abundantly clear that I am in no way claiming that Perez voted for Trump or any other Republican. I am not even claiming that Maldonado voted for Trump. Maybe he was wearing the MAGA cap ironically. But, it has been established that she did apparently attend a Trump rally in 2019 and that she may even have a Trump supporter working for her campaign, and so we are left with so many questions. Has she attended any other pro-Trump events that we should be aware of? Are there any Trump supporters working in her campaign? Perhaps, more importantly, why is she so ambivalent about Trump and Trumpism? Has she been voting Democrat because it’s politically expedient? Were the commissioners on the El Paso County Commissioners Court who appointed her to the judicial seat and the various local Democratic organizations that endorsed her aware of these developments? Unfortunately, Perez has, as noted by Rivas Valenzuela, steadfastly refused to provide any type of explanation about these questions. The campaign mailer Perez circulated in response to Estrada’s campaign mailer also fails to provide any clarification on these questions. And so, in the absence of any information to the contrary, we are left to speculate that she either doesn’t understand the threat posed by Trumpism or, alternatively, that she doesn’t take the Mexican American community’s well-founded concerns relating to Trump seriously. In short, Judge Perez seems soft on Trump, for whatever reason, and that is simply unacceptable to many Mexican Americans.
About the Author:
The Perimeter is by columnist Aldo Mena. Aldo N. Mena is a local educator, podcaster, freelance writer, and native El Pasoan who enjoys exploring issues of relevance to the Mexican American community. He is a graduate of the University of New Mexico where he received a B.A. in English and Political Science, and an M.A. in Latin American Studies with a research concentration in late colonial/early national period Mexican history.
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