CHAPTER 5

PHYSICAL VIOLENCE

THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM’S “BROWN”

VERSUS BLACK DYNAMIC

For most spectators, what was most notable about the Charlottesville, Virginia, August 2017 Unite the Right Rally was the alarming vision of marchers proudly identifying themselves as neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, neofascists, White nationalists, and Ku Klux Klan members. Violence erupted. One of those White supremacists accelerated his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer and leaving nineteen others injured, five critically.

LATINO WHITE SUPREMACISTS

The White supremacists who caused the Charlottesville violence were not solely White non-Hispanics. Alex Michael Ramos, a Latino from Marietta, Georgia, also took part in the White nationalist rally and then joined five other White nationalists in surrounding a Black man, DeAndre Harris, in a parking lot and beating him with wooden boards and a metal pipe. Ramos defended his attack on this special education teacher’s aide in a video on his Facebook page, saying that he couldn’t be a racist because he was Spanish, specifically Puerto Rican.¹

With that single statement, Ramos encapsulated the perversity of Latino anti-Black violence—the Latino Teflon shield against racism charges while being racist. Latino community leader Rosa Clemente noted at the time that “although Ramos expressed and enacted the most vile and violent form of White supremacy, his thinking is not uncommon among a minority of Puerto Ricans.”² Nor is such thinking restricted to Puerto Ricans.

When Peruvian American George Zimmerman killed unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin for walking in his neighborhood in 2012, Zimmerman’s relatives and defenders insisted that the murder was not racist because Zimmerman was Latino. Zimmerman’s brother Robert explicitly stated that Zimmerman was not “some kind of mythological racist monster [because] he is actually a Hispanic non-racist person.”³ All of which strongly suggests that sociologist George Yancey’s survey research indicating that Latinos (unlike African Americans) are more disposed to believing that Latinos cannot be racist is also applicable in the more extreme context of physical violence and murder.⁴

Unfortunately, George Zimmerman and Alex Michael Ramos are not isolated examples of Latinos harboring racialized violence. The Southern Poverty Law Center has noticed that there is a disturbing trend of more Latinos joining White supremacist hate groups.⁵ These Latinos include people like Christopher Rey Monzon, a twenty-two-year-old Cuban American, associated with the neo-Confederate hate group League of the South. Monzon was arrested weeks after Charlottesville for charging at protesters in a separate Florida demonstration. Nick Fuentes, a nineteen-year-old student who hosts an alt-right podcast called America First, also participated in the Charlottesville protests. In an interview with National Public Radio, Juan Cadavid, a Colombian-born Californian who now goes by the name Johnny Benitez, shared how he is an advocate for what he called “white identity politics”—which includes embracing the “14 Words”⁶ slogan used by White supremacists: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”⁷ Finally, the January 6, 2021, terrorist attack on the US capitol included Latino members of the White supremacist group Proud Boys (including but not limited to Bryan Betancur, Louis Colon, Nicholas DeCarlo, Gabriel Garcia, and William Pepe). Disturbingly, the Proud Boys’ chairman is Cuban American Enrique Tarrio.

PRISONS

When the criminal justice system has been able to see beyond the veil of the “I can’t be racist—I’m Latino” defense to anti-Black racial violence and convict Latino White supremacists, it in turn places them in prison institutions that themselves breed White supremacy and reinforce the anti-Blackness of Latino inmates. Anti-Defamation League researchers have noted that Latino White nationalists in California’s large prison-gang systems have aligned themselves with White supremacist gangs. One prison gang known as the Nazi Low Riders (NLR) is made up of California Youth Authority inmates who serve as foot soldiers for the Aryan Brotherhood. The NLR gang is willing to accept Latinos with the proviso that “you must have at least half white blood, but no black blood.”⁸ NLR is also present in other states like Arizona, Colorado, Florida, and Illinois.

Prisons often operate with explicit norms of racial segregation, despite US Supreme Court case law that racially segregated prisons compromise an inmate’s Equal Protection racial equality rights.⁹ Institutionally, creating such racialized prison spaces to control prison violence is not supposed to be tolerated unless absolutely needed for proper prison administration. However, preserving prison security is considered by the Supreme Court to be a compelling state interest that can justify racial segregation. This, in effect, permits many prisons to continue to structure and maintain racially segregated spaces.¹⁰

Absent official membership in White prison gangs, Latino-specific gangs still position themselves in opposition to African American prison gangs. This is underscored by repeated instances of prison riots rooted in Latino versus African American gang violence. In 2009, a California prison riot occurred when Latino prison gangs started fighting African American gangs in hand-to-hand combat.¹¹ This incident left more than two hundred prisoners injured and fifty-five hospitalized. Yet, when questioned about the violence, a prison official revealed that another riot among “Hispanic and black prisoners” had occurred earlier that same year. Similarly, in 2007, an eight-hundred-inmate California prison riot occurred “when a black and a Hispanic prisoner began fighting, prompting other prisoners to join divided along racial lines.”¹² Another California prison experienced a weeklong race riot in 2006 that resulted in the deaths of prisoners.¹³

Latino prisoners who are not gang members when they enter the prison system are quickly indoctrinated into the “convict code” rules on Latino inmates not associating with African American inmates.¹⁴ Jesse Vasquez, who spent eighteen years in California state prisons, explains how California prisons taught him racism at the age of eighteen. “My first lesson in racial discrimination happened at the maximum-security prison at Calipatria, Calif. An older Mexican dude with the signature handlebar mustache told me in a Hollywood whisper, ‘Hey, homie, we don’t associate with llantas (tires) around here. The animales (animals) have their own rules. We follow ours. Don’t talk to them too much because someone might feel disrespected, and you’re going to get dealt with.’”¹⁵ Getting dealt with meant—“I’d get beat up or stabbed for . . . interactions with the black guys: The phone on their side of the day room and their concrete tables on the yard were off limits. No eating, lingering or trading with them. And definitely no arguing: If a black guy so much as raised his voice, I was supposed to punch him in the mouth even if it started a riot.”¹⁶ As another Latino prison gang member details, there is a “zero tolerance towards blacks” inasmuch as the Latino gangs forbade them “to drink from water fountains or use telephones blacks have used, to touch blacks, or to accept drugs or cigarettes from blacks.”¹⁷

The Latino prison gang vigilance toward prizing segregation from African Americans then mutually reinforces the Latino street-gang focus on keeping African Americans out of so-called Latino spaces regardless of their lack of affiliation with Black gangs. This is because incarcerated Latino gang members dictate the rules of racial segregation, the level of violence for maintenance of the segregation, and the gang initiation rituals designating street anti-Black violence as the ticket for admission into the Latino gang.¹⁸ In California specifically, interethnic violence centers on the targeting of African American residents by Latino street gangs operating with the explicitly stated goal of eradicating African Americans from “Latino” spaces. This is clearly demonstrated by the evidence brought forth in a number of criminal cases and the police and FBI investigations that precipitated them. They begin with Latino gang initiations that require unprovoked physical attacks on random Black people.

In 2017, California resident Louis Vasquez was sentenced to twenty-one years to life in prison for the attempted murder of two Black men who were strangers to him, because he was directed to attack two random Black people by a gang.¹⁹ Vasquez followed the gang directive by first attacking a shopping center employee in the Los Angeles County community of Covina who was collecting shopping carts in front of the mall. The employee was an eighteen-year-old African American teenager whom Vasquez stabbed in the shoulder with a kitchen knife and yelled racial slurs at during the attack. After attacking the teenager, Vazquez then proceeded to target an African American man who was walking toward the CVS pharmacy in the strip mall. A surveillance video captured how Vasquez chased the CVS customer and stabbed him in the shoulder and knee area.

Several years before, the west San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles witnessed very similar Latino gang-initiated violence. Anthony Gonzales and Francisco Vasquez were two men that were driven to the west San Fernando Valley by Latino gang members for the purpose of harming Black passersby.²⁰ After being dropped off, both men opened fire on two randomly selected African American men as they yelled racial slurs at them. Neither of the victims were gang members or persons that had provoked the violence. Both Vasquez and Gonzales were convicted of a racial hate crime and attempted murder of the African American men.

Other Latino-gang anti-Black violence has been larger scale and much more systematic. Federal prosecutors have successfully proven outright conspiracies. In 2019, seven members of the Los Angeles Hazard Grande (Big Hazard) Latino street gang pled guilty to firebombing the Ramona Gardens public housing complex in East Los Angeles with the specific intent of driving Black residents out of the Boyle Heights neighborhood.²¹ The Hazard Grande gang was affiliated with the Mexican Mafia prison gang, which ordered the firebombings as part of their mutual commitment to eradicating Black people from the predominantly Latino Ramona Gardens complex. At the time of the 2014 firebombing, African Americans comprised only 4 percent of the nearly eighteen hundred people living in Ramona Gardens.

Weeks of planning culminated in the targeting of African American households on a Mother’s Day evening while Black families and children were sleeping. While wearing masks and wielding hammers, gang members smashed the windows of Black families’ apartments in order to toss in ignited Molotov cocktails (glass bottles filled with gasoline). Prior to the attack, the gang members monitored the Black residents and warned them that they were living in Hazard Grande territory and would be at risk as long as they stayed there.

While the number of Black families living in Ramona Gardens was very small, their presence was still a marked contrast to their near absence over the two previous decades, precipitated in 1992 as Black families fled when the Hazard Grande gang detonated explosive devices in the apartments of two Black families. At that time only seven Black families lived in the complex, but they all evacuated after the Hazard Grande terrorized them. By 2014, the Latino gang viewed even a handful of Black families as an encroachment into their space and warranted another firebombing. The gang members were successfully convicted because of the joint investigation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles Fire Department, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Part of what incentivized the federal and state government agencies to expend their joint resources on the investigation and prosecution of the firebombings was the history of Latino gangs terrorizing peaceful Black residents as a campaign of racial exclusion. Several years before the Ramona Gardens attack, a Latino gang caused twenty homicides when it conducted a campaign to push Black residents out of the unincorporated Florence-Firestone neighborhood of Los Angeles.²²

Back in 2011, another Southern California city, Azusa, was also the center of a twenty-four-count indictment charging fifty-one Latino defendants for conspiring to murder African Americans.²³ Detective Robert Landeros of the Azusa police department noted, “This has been a 20 year conspiracy to violate the civil rights of African Americans in the city.”²⁴ The indictment was the culmination of a three-year criminal investigation of the Varrio Azusa 13 gang, a Latino gang attempting to clear Azusa of African Americans during a two-decade crime spree of harassment and attacks.

Particularly relevant to the issue of interethnic violence is that the attacks were not against rival gang members. Rather, the conspiracy was characterized by its animus against civilian African American homeowners and students whom Azusa 13 wished to push out of the city or prevent from moving there.²⁵ All fifty-one gang members were convicted of various charges, including a conspiracy to purge Azusa of its Black residents. At the sentencing of the guilty parties, the judge emphatically stated that the gang leader “was a proponent of the racial cleansing of the city of Azusa.”²⁶

The same charges were lodged in the 2009 criminal indictment against 147 members of the Varrio Hawaiian Gardens Latino gang for engaging in a conspiracy to systematically rid Hawaiian Gardens of all African Americans.²⁷ At the time, it was the largest gang sweep in US history.²⁸ The accused gang leaders were convicted and received lengthy prison sentences for their “conspiracy against African American community members, solely due to their race” after boasting about being racist and referring to themselves as a “hate gang.”²⁹

The impetus for the large-scale government investigations into Latino-gang anti-Black violence was in large measure triggered by public attention to the murder of Cheryl Green on December 15, 2006, a fourteen-year-old eighth grader. The teen was gunned down in broad daylight as she perched near her scooter, chatting with friends in her Harbor Gateway neighborhood of Los Angeles. In the case of Cheryl Green, members of the Latino 204th Street gang were tried and found guilty of murder and a hate crime.³⁰ During the trial, federal prosecutors demonstrated that African American residents were terrorized in an effort to force them out of a neighborhood perceived as Latino.³¹ Yet as early as 2001, the British Broadcasting Company noted in a news item entitled “Hate in Action” that Latino gangs in Los Angeles had a clear mission of anti-Black ethnic cleansing in their neighborhoods that motivated their involvement in anti-Black hate crimes in the United States.³²

Hence, the Avenues Latino gang members were convicted for a six-year conspiracy to assault and murder African Americans in Highland Park, just twenty-three miles away from Harbor Green.³³ During the trial, prosecutors demonstrated that the Latino expulsion of African American residents was suggestive of ethnic cleansing. One African American victim in the case was murdered as he looked for a parking space near his Highland Park home, and another African American victim was shot simply for waiting at a bus stop in Highland Park. Debra Wong Yang, the US attorney for the Central District of California stated that the men “were killed by the defendants simply because they were African Americans who chose to live in a particular neighborhood. As this case demonstrates, we will aggressively pursue hate crimes such as this and convict those responsible for such reprehensible acts.”³⁴ In another incident, a woman was knocked off her bicycle and her husband was threatened with a box cutter by one of the Latino attackers, who said, “You N——rs have been here long enough.”³⁵

Later, a 2007 investigation into the Los Angeles–area Latino anti-Black violence noted that the predominant pattern was one of Latino gang members assaulting Black passersby while either yelling racial expletives, such as “Fuck N——rs. This is T-Flats [Varrio Tortilla Flats gang area]” and “What the fuck are you N——rs doing here? . . . Monkeys,” or posting racially exclusionary graffiti by the murder sites, such as “Mayates [N——rs] get out” and “187 N——rs” (referring to California Penal Code 187 for murder).³⁶ In fact, the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations notes that Latino street gangs have been the most violent perpetrators of hate crimes in the region, primarily against African Americans.³⁷

The involvement of gangs in Los Angeles has induced many to deny the racial import of the violence.³⁸ Yet, longitudinal studies of hate crimes in Los Angeles County demonstrate a clear racial aspect. When UCLA urban planner Karen Umemoto conducted a statistical study of Los Angeles County law enforcement data over a five-year period, she uncovered a number of disturbing patterns.³⁹ First, there was a disproportionate rate of increase in the victimization of African Americans as compared with other groups. The number of African American victims increased by 70 percent, while the number of Asian American and Pacific Islander victims increased 21 percent, the number of White victims increased by 6 percent, and the number of Latino victims decreased by 8.4 percent. In contrast to the victimization trends, there was a slight decline in the number of reported African American perpetrators, while there was an increase with all other groups. Latino perpetrators had the sharpest rise in number with a 59.2 percent increase. Most disturbing, though, was the study’s discovery that Latinos were disproportionately the perpetrators of bias crimes against African Americans with no known gang affiliations.

While it is true that general crime statistics very likely undercount the number of incidents where undocumented Latino immigrants are victims of crime, given their reticence to call any attention to their undocumented status by reporting a crime, it is also true that the number of incidents where African Americans are the victims of Latino crime may also suffer an undercount due to the manner in which many criminal databases code Latino offenders as solely “White.”⁴⁰ Furthermore, hate crime murders is not a context where victim reporting is necessary for criminal investigation. And it is within this context that Latinos have been documented as the disproportionate aggressors against African Americans rather than being the victims of African American attacks.

African Americans have been singled out for racial violence in ways that make the issue of racism inescapable. Indeed, the court convictions detailed in this chapter demonstrate that labeling the terrorism as racially motivated is not the mere result of sensation-seeking media outlets that describe it as such but, more importantly, a reflection of the careful presentation of evidence with the exacting criminal law standard of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.⁴¹

However, it should be noted that this chapter’s examination does not purport to present physical assault as the predominant interaction between African Americans and Latinos, nor as the primary source of violence in communities of color. Indeed, it still continues to be the case that the greatest source of bloodshed in communities of color is intraracial.⁴² Nevertheless, even though the interethnic violence may be a statistically small occurrence, it is still a troubling state of affairs that civil rights organizations state merits analysis and a resolution.

THE ROLE OF RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION

Empirical research suggests that a variety of factors contribute to Latino anti-Black interactions that can vary by region of the country.⁴³ What is quite noteworthy, though, is the predominance of California, and Los Angeles in particular, as the scene of Latino anti-Black violence. No other multiracial city has reported Los Angeles’ levels of Latino anti-Black assaults. How did the Los Angeles metropolitan area come to such a state of affairs, despite the cautionary legacy of the 1992 unrest? To begin to understand the Los Angeles context, it is centrally important to circle back to the issues of residential segregation and racially segmented labor markets discussed in the previous chapters, rather than relying upon the popular but oversimplified notion that Latino-specific dynamics in California are caused by the presence of large numbers of Latino immigrants.

While Latino immigrants have been documented to express negative views of African Americans, and demonstrate a preference for segregation from African Americans, the violence in Los Angeles has been perpetuated in large measure by US-born Latinos.⁴⁴ It is US-born Latinos who, in becoming “Americanized,” experience themselves as socially undesirable raced subjects. Those who are not wealthy enough or light enough to be permitted the social access of assimilation are seemingly locked into the urban-poverty quagmire of underfinanced schools, inadequate healthcare, and scarce employment opportunities.

At the same time that employers actively seek Latino immigrant labor for low-wage positions, low-skill-labor US Latinos are excluded as a “less malleable” worker population. Indeed, the Americanization process provides English-speaking, US-born Latinos with greater information and assertiveness about worker rights. Moreover, US-born Latinos have a sense of enhanced status as US English-speaking applicants, and this in combination with their repeated exposure to rampant US consumerism, disinclines them to seek the same low-wage jobs as Latino immigrants. This results in a high rate of jobless US-born Latino men on the street searching for status and meaning, which is a context ripe for gang culture violence that exploits the tensions of residential segregation.

Living in segregated proximity to African Americans, who are derided in Latin America as well as the United States, facilitates the notion that US Latino status depends upon a clear separation and removal of African Americans from “Latino spaces.” In this way, California Latino gang members are employing “turf defense.” Turf defense is the social-psychological dynamic in which a racially homogeneous group seeks to preserve their residential homogeneity.⁴⁵ When Latinos are segregated out of White non-Hispanic spaces and fighting for status in limited “colored” spaces, turf defense explodes into interethnic violence, a continuing legacy of White segregation. Indeed, in each of the California locations in which the federal government has investigated and prosecuted Latino gang members for what is tantamount to ethnic cleansing campaigns, African Americans have made up a small percentage of the neighborhood. Rather, the area is statistically dominated by Latinos, where both groups are clearly segregated from White non-Hispanics.⁴⁶

Latinos are generally segregated from African Americans but are even more segregated from White non-Hispanics. However, in some locations Latinos are more segregated from African Americans than they are from White non-Hispanics.⁴⁷ Nevertheless, recent trends indicate that Latinos and African Americans are increasingly likely to be neighbors.⁴⁸ Being neighbors jointly excluded from White non-Hispanic spaces influences Latino and African American involvement with the criminal justice system. In a study that examined census data and arrest data from New York and California, a correlation was found between racial segregation and Latino and African American violence. Specifically, the study noted that the racial segregation of Latinos and African Americans from White non-Hispanics seemingly contributes to the commission of homicides by Latinos and African Americans.⁴⁹ Being excluded from White non-Hispanic spaces and opportunities subjugates Latinos and African Americans in ways that create powder kegs of frustration and displaced searches for community power. As a consequence, the turnover of neighborhoods from majority Black to majority Latino creates its own ethnic tensions that also contribute to interethnic violence.⁵⁰

Even so, the actual rate of segregation is less a factor in turf defense than the social meaning of the space.⁵¹ As Elise Boddie notes, like human beings, geographic spaces can have a racial identity.⁵² Racial meanings are accorded to spaces based on social biases about the people who inhabit, frequent, or are associated with particular places. Changes in the demography of residents over time changes the racial identity of spaces. Once those social meanings are developed, residents can then become invested in protecting the racial meaning of a space as vociferously as their own personal identity, because it feels like their racial status is at stake. Excluding others is a device to erect and sustain racial hierarchy. This then helps explain how the historically African American city of Compton in Los Angeles County has also witnessed Latino anti-Black hate crimes against non-gang-affiliated African American residents since its shift to becoming 65 percent Latino and only 33 percent African American as of the 2010 census.⁵³ As of 2019, Latinos are 68 percent and African Americans only 29 percent of the Compton population.⁵⁴

Boddie calls it “racial territoriality” when people of color are excluded from public spaces that are identified as White and treated as being only for White people. Extending Boddie’s useful concept of racial territoriality to the exclusionary actions of people of color themselves helps elucidate the turf defense dynamic observed within interethnic violence among Latinos and African Americans.⁵⁵ This is well exemplified by a California Pomona 12th Street gang member who, during his murder trial for participation in the Latino “N——r Killers” campaign, stated that it would be “humiliating” to 12th Street gangsters to allow African Americans to live in their neighborhood.⁵⁶

EVERYDAY VIOLENCE

It would be a mistake, though, to relegate the concern about Latino anti-Black violence only to members of Latino gangs in California and official White supremacist organizations. Some examples of non-gang-affiliated Latino anti-Black violence in California include Arturo Santiago, while riding a North County Transit bus, striking a Black man on his head with a glass bottle while uttering racial slurs.⁵⁷ Another incident is that of Latinos Jeremiah Hernandez and William Soto, who were tried for burning an eleven-foot cross outside the house of a Black teenager in San Luis Obispo County, California, while she was home watching television.⁵⁸ At the time the crime occurred, Hernandez was thirty-two years old and Soto was twenty years old.

Extensive property damage can also accompany Latino anti-Black racial harassment in California. Latino Mark Anthony Taylor, a student at California State University at Chico (CSU-Chico), was found guilty of causing $175,000 worth of property damage when he battered the door and window of the apartment where two CSU-Chico African American students (Abdul Benjamin and Brandon Sykes) lived, all while yelling: “N——r,” “we hate you fucking N——rs,” “you fucking N——rs get out of here,” and “you fucking N——rs, why are you here?”⁵⁹ Mark Anthony Taylor was also incarcerated because his racist conduct that day included physically assaulting Brandon while calling him a “fucking N——r” a number of times and stating that he, Taylor, represented “white pride” and was thus “tired of all the things you blacks are doing around here.” Notably, Mark Anthony Taylor was joined by three White non-Hispanic students who endorsed his White supremacist violence by urging him to “get that N——r.”

Moreover, a number of examples illustrate the operation of anti-Black violence in quotidian Latino spaces across the country. Luis Alberto Gonzalez, a White Cuban, was walking in Hialeah, Florida (a predominantly Latino city outside Miami), when he saw two Black men (brothers Andy Alexander and Tarvis James) exiting a pizza parlor. Gonzalez decided to yell at them “You fucking N——rs! What are you doing in my town robbing people?!”⁶⁰ Gonzalez then got in his car, and when the brothers simply walked away, Gonzalez was angered because he thought they “appeared arrogant” as they walked past him. Angered by the “arrogance” of two Black men walking the streets of Hialeah, Gonzalez accelerated his car toward the brothers and attempted to run them over. When questioned by the police, Gonzalez admitted that what motivated his actions was his prejudice against Black people.

Yet, initially, Gonzalez claimed that it was Andy and Tarvis who initiated the interaction by robbing him at gunpoint. Only when Gonzalez provided a series of conflicting versions of his robbery story did the police investigate further and conclude from the collective statements of several witnesses that Gonzalez was not the victim of a crime but rather the aggressor of violence against men who posed no threat to him. In short, Gonzalez’s anti-Black hostility informed not only his act of violence but also his falsified accusation of a criminal act by his victims.

Other cases from around the country also evidence anti-Black violence from individual Latinos. For example, in Winter Park, Florida, at Full Sail University, Xavier Nunez stabbed a Black student in his Statistics class with a screwdriver while yelling racial slurs.⁶¹ The police arrested Nunez for aggravated battery with a deadly weapon after he told them that he hated Black people. In Illinois, Anthony Morales, a Latino student from Northwestern University, pleaded guilty to joining a classmate in vandalizing the university’s chapel, which he had spray-painted with anti-Black racist slurs.⁶² In Iowa, Latino Andy Benavidez instigated a fistfight with a Black man he called a racial slur. While committing the aggression, he wore a surgical mask (prior to the COVID-19 pandemic) because he was “allergic to black people” and did not want their germs to infect him.⁶³ Police charged Benavidez with a hate crime after he admitted that he fought with the victim only because he was Black. In New Mexico, Jose Campos was arrested by police after they found him graffiti-tagging racial slurs outside the home of a Black woman.⁶⁴

LATINO LAW ENFORCEMENT

Even Latino police officers exhibit anti-Blackness when acting upon the stereotypical concept of all Blacks as criminal.⁶⁵ This is best encapsulated by the manner in which Latino Texas state trooper Brian T. Encinia escalated a routine traffic stop into an intensely violent encounter. In 2015, Encinia stopped African American motorist Sandra Bland for failing to signal a lane change in Prairie View, Texas, near Houston. When Sandra refused to stop smoking her cigarette during the stop, Encinia ordered her out of the car, threatening to “yank” her out as he drew his Taser and then shouted, “I will light you up.” The patrol car’s dash camera footage also recorded Sandra being restrained in handcuffs and the sound of her sobbing voice saying she was in pain from having been slammed to the ground. Three days later, Sandra was found in her jail cell dead from hanging, in what was ruled a suicide. Encinia ultimately resigned from the Texas State Troopers and agreed never to work in law enforcement again.

Today, Sandra Bland is remembered for inspiring the #SayHerName campaign against police racial bias and violence. What few have taken notice of is that while Encinia is racially White, he is ethnically Latino.⁶⁶ The oversight preserves the image of police racial bias as uniquely a White non-Hispanic problem, which in turn leaves unattended the implications of Latino anti-Blackness. Yet, many Afro-Latinos report that Latino police officers are harsher in their treatment of Latinos than non-Latino police officers are.⁶⁷

Moreover, Latino police officers’ attitudes about police violence against Blacks work in lockstep with that of White non-Hispanic police officers’. Specifically, unlike African American police officers, Latino and White non-Hispanic police officers interpret fatal encounters between the police and Blacks as isolated incidents rather than as signs of a broader problem between the police and Blacks.⁶⁸ Significantly, as with White non-Hispanic officers, Latino officer attitudes about Blackness result in the unjustified killing of Black people. Such was the case when Minnesota Latino police officer Jeronimo Yanez killed African American Philando Castile during a routine traffic stop for a defective brake light. The encounter was captured by the squad car dash cam and broadcast on Facebook in 2016.⁶⁹

In fact, before the worldwide observance of the 2021 Derek Chauvin trial for killing George Floyd, one of the few convictions of police officer misconduct, was that of a Latino police officer named Raimundo Atesiano. Atesiano was a police chief in Biscayne, Florida, with a policy of directing his officers to pin any unsolved crimes on random Black people. His mandate to his officers was that “if they [Blacks] have burglaries that are open cases that are not solved yet, if you see anybody black walking through our streets and they have somewhat of a record, arrest them so we can pin them for all the burglaries.”⁷⁰ He also used a designated code to alert officers when a Black person “was seen in the city and needed to be stopped and confronted.” Chief Raimundo Atesiano’s campaign against Black people was not halted until he was sentenced in 2018 to three years in prison for encouraging wrongful arrests.⁷¹

Importantly, the speculation that Latino police officers in the United States are merely mimicking White non-Hispanic racial attitudes in order to ingratiate themselves with the White non-Hispanic police hierarchies in which they seek to advance is severely undermined by the comparison to police conduct in Puerto Rico. In the US territory of Puerto Rico, Puerto-Rican Latino officers dominate the police force yet evidence the same racial attitudes about Blackness as Latino officers in White non-Hispanic-dominated police forces. As one Afro-Puerto Rican college student, Nina Figueroa, observes, “The police in Puerto Rico are very racist and also have a lot of social stigmas because they believe that black people come from the hood, come here to steal . . . that we are criminals.”⁷² Indeed, the police department has been under federally mandated reform since 2013 and is still being monitored for compliance with nondiscrimination and equal protection laws.⁷³

Yet, Afro-Latinos in Puerto Rico are repeatedly harassed and monitored closely by the police without probable cause. Nor are Afro-Latino children excluded from police racial aggression. Eleven-year-old special-education student Alma Yariela Cruz argued with two bullies who had taunted her for two years with racial slurs, such as “negra sucia” (dirty Black girl), “negra asquerosa” (disgusting Black girl), “negra dientúa” (big-tooth Black girl), along with racist commentary about her Afro-descended hair. But when the police were called to the school, they filed criminal charges against Alma. This diminutive and slender dark-skinned Afro-Latina child was charged with disturbing the peace and battery, and the Puerto Rico Department of Justice prosecuted the case for over a year amid outrage from social-activist groups before finally withdrawing the claim as unfounded.⁷⁴

As distinct as Puerto Rico is from California and California is from Florida and all the other contexts discussed in this book, what remains constant is the role of Latino Whiteness in anti-Black violence and Latino law enforcement hostility. What the stories of discrimination related in this chapter reveal is that the Latino pursuit of social status is entangled with denigrating Blackness as a device for performing Whiteness. To police the boundaries of Latino White spaces (metaphorically and often literally) from unwanted Black incursions is to effectively embody Whiteness itself, regardless of one’s racial appearance. Whether conscious or implicit, the Latino alignment with Whiteness that discriminates against Blackness, all while denying that Latinos are even capable of harboring bias, makes Latinos not only victims of racism themselves but also part of the problem of White supremacy. The next chapter considers what this means for the future of racial equality in the United States.