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An Immigration Debate Steered by Taco Trucks

Ruben Navarrett Jr. on

SAN DIEGO -- Twenty-three years ago, over lunch in a Basque restaurant in Fresno, my longtime friend and mentor -- the great Mexican-American essayist Richard Rodriguez -- offered an interesting thought about what was driving the transformation of the United States into a Latino country.

(That reminds me. I should let you know that the nation's 54 million Latinos had a meeting and took a vote. The new country will be named: "Latino-landia." You'll get used to it.)

Rodriguez talked about how he had recently interviewed a white supremacist who absolutely loved Mexican food.

"People always think that culture is going to arrive in an evening gown," he said. "It's coming in a taco."

As we say in Spanish, dicho y hecho. Said and done.

In the 1940s, Mexican-American students who brought tacos to school for lunch would eat them in a corner so as not to be teased by classmates. Today, white parents in the suburbs fill their kids' backpacks with prepacked lunch meals -- some of which contain chips, salsa and, yes, tacos.

 

And we have a new paradox in this country: There are many Americans who don't like Mexicans but they love Mexican food.

So you wouldn't expect these folks to get too worked up over the apocalyptic scenario envisioned by Marco Gutierrez, founder of "Latinos for Trump."

Really? Why not "Chickens for Colonel Sanders"?

Having migrated to the United States from Mexico as a young man in 1991, Gutierrez fired up the cultural wars recently when -- during an appearance on MSNBC's "All In With Chris Hayes" -- he told guest host Joy Reid that uncontrolled immigration would lead to "taco trucks [on] every corner."

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