To the editor: Gustavo Arellano’s current column within the Los Angeles Instances making an attempt to melt Cynthia Gonzalez’s remarks about gang members “defending [their] turf” is greater than disappointing (“What an L.A. County politician meant when she hit up ‘cholos’ to fight ICE,” June 26). It’s harmful.
Let’s be clear: Gonzalez, in her function as vice mayor of Cudahy, didn’t name for peaceable resistance. She explicitly invoked violent road gangs — with lengthy histories of homicide, extortion and drug trafficking — to take up house and energy towards federal brokers. That’s not protest. That’s incitement.
My mother and father owned a 7-Eleven on the nook of Figueroa and Avenue 52 for 35 years and had direct expertise in coping with the avenue’s gangs. It was a terrifying drawback for them, and gang tradition is just not one thing to be glorified.
As a substitute of holding Gonzalez accountable, Arellano selected to romanticize her rhetoric, casting it as a part of a misunderstood barrio custom. That’s not evaluation. That’s complicity. He reframes her language as nostalgic, as if calling on teams like Florencia 13 and 18th Road to “shield” their neighborhoods is by some means a cultural rallying cry as an alternative of what it’s: reckless and inflammatory.
What’s equally troubling is UCLA’s silence. Gonzalez was just lately named director of a program there that trains educators. If she continues to carry that title it could ship a chilling message: that incendiary, harmful rhetoric is excusable if it’s cloaked in the appropriate cultural language — and that’s an ordinary no establishment of integrity ought to stand behind.
If Arellano needs to champion communities like mine, he ought to cease filtering them by way of sentimentality and begin confronting what’s actual: Gonzalez’s phrases usually are not misunderstood. They’re unacceptable. And his spin solely makes them extra so.
Migdia Chinea, Glendale
