Racism and Prejudice was His Strategy: PETE WILSON Ruined a Political Party as a Result
“Activist Enrique Morones, who spearheaded the removal effort, told the Union-Tribune he is glad the statue was taken down because it was not something the community wanted in the first place.
“No one has unified the Latino community more than Pete Wilson,” Morones said in an email. “His racist support of Proposition 187 back in 1994 unified Latino community and supporters of human rights, against him.”
In 1994, voters approved the Wilson-supported Proposition 187, which sought to limit illegal immigration by cutting off state services, including health care and public education, to undocumented immigrants in California. A federal judge later ruled it unconstitutional.” ….Sacramento Bee Oct 19, 2020
Good ole boy Pete Wilson. He took over the Reagan tradition, nice smile, killer policy. For some reason, mostly because they didn’t have the Vietnam War to use as the boogieman anymore, turned its cheap shot cheating politics on Mexican immigrants. This is a state that has San as the first name of countless communities. But English only was Pete’s strategy.
Pete Wilson gave ethnocentrism a bad name!
Fact: the Mexican War was a “instrument” of Manifest Destiny that won the west literally through a put up war.
The United States was caught in a fatal confrontation over slave and free states. This was a huge issue that rested its efforts to avoid Civil War on balancing slave and free states.
A country that had initially refused to deal with free and slave, instead developed a convoluted Republic, that allowed a minority of the states to in essence run the rest of the nation.
The Mexican War was an attempt by a Democratic President, Polk, to break the stalemate and make more slave states, who already had the lion’s share of Constitutional Power, into a solid slave majority in the United States. The plan was to use war and wedge politics, with a healthy dose of racism toward Mexico to expand slavery.
The problem was, California already was deeplySpanish and Mexican.
The hard reality was Spain got there first. The great territory of California, was much bigger than today; including parts of Oregon, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, parts of Colorado etc.
These represented new states in the fractured union, that would break the balance of the confusing set of “compromises” (give the south what it wanted) that kept the fractured union together.
Pete Wilson must have read this history, (and didn’t understand it like all radical racists do) because he tried the same basic strategy, using racism and prejudice he attacked Mexico; he attacked Mexican Americans who had been captured in the Mexican War against their will, and then made into people without a country. It had worked for Reagan, it worked for Polk, why not him.
He dreamed of becoming President just like his boss, Reagan.
Unfortunately for good ole Pete, the demographics of California had always been dominated by Mexicans. Prior to the Gold Rush this was natural, since California belonged to Spain and then to Mexico when Mexico got its independence.
And this war, and subsequent competition for huge swaths of land, needed to genocide the original occupants. From 1850 to 1870 over 150,000 Native Americans were killed for bounty…That’s right for money men, women and children were killed.
This was civilization gone terribly wrong. But the glaring criminal behavior of the United States still haunts the region.
Witness Pete Wilson. In an attempt to comply with his former boss’s wishes, Ronald Reagan, Wilson came up with a nativistic approach to win back California that was even then moving to the left.
Blame people of color. And boy did he, he used every dirty trick in the book to “prove” that Mexicans were illegally entering the west to “rape and pillage”.
The fact was the vast majority of “illegals” had been moving across the border since 1850, since their grandparents and relatives LIVED IN WHAT HAD BEEN MEXICO BUT NOW WAS “CALIFORNIA”.
1850 is barely 100 years from the late twentieth century, so the “Mexican Invasion” of illegals were made “illegal” by America’s land grab in the Mexican War.
In the 1990s Reagan’s popularity was still formable in California…he had become President and had installed modern conservatism in the nation; irregardless of its homophobia and racism.
In short, Wilson was using the playbook of attack Mexican immigrants as the enemy. There were hosts of “initiatives” that attacked people of color under the guise of “white nationalism” and purity of Californias as Anglo Saxon white people.
This was never said, but implied in a series of initiative battles that set out to wall off Mexicans from their kin fold.
And it failed miserably. People got wise to the “English only” to the segregation of Mexican Americans from the mainstream, because there was simply too much Mexican/Spanish culture in the western states to legislate away.
Initiatives were passed and were declared unconstitutional. Mexican Americans and their descendants voted Democratic, a party that in California anyway, was a much more diverse ethnically than the all white and conservative Republican majority.
California had been a Republican state mostly because it consisted of abolitionists and Lincoln adherence. The Democratic Party had not morphed into the diversity party until the 1970s but that was well in advance of Wilson’s 1990s racist Renaissance that he was using to run for President.
After all, his patron saint, Reagan had done it…
But San Diego, San Francisco…San this and San that was too much culture to overcome. In spirt of efforts to disenfranchise Mexican Americans and the Supreme Court, Wilson and the hard right in California began to fade, in spite and because of, its white supremacy.