Abstract

On 16 June 2015, during his presidential announcement address, Donald Trump declared:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you… . They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists… . I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I will have Mexico pay for that wall.

(www.businessinsider.com/donald-trumps-epic-statement-on-mexico-2015-7) Presidential candidate Trump’s assertions caused either immediate criticism or support spread through media and social networks. Many believed he did not have a chance to win the Republican party’s presidential nomination and that he would soon be out of the race. However, the success of his fierce discourse was demonstrated when he became the U.S. Republican Party’s presidential nominee and, several months later, the president of the United States. For those of us who have been living on the U.S.-Mexico border most of our lives, trans-border dwellers, fronterizas/os (inhabitants of the Mexican side of the border), Chicanas/os, Mexicanas/os, Latinas/os, Hispanics, Indigenous peoples, and “others,” Trump’s comments and his nomination were not shocking. His words merely echo the discriminatory Anglo narratives towards Mexicans that have been heard for years, both before and after Mexico lost a significant part of its territory to the United States in 1848 and 1853. President Trump’s remarks also reiterate the state of violence our ancestors endured during and after the U.S. settlement and conquest of the West, as well as the underlying and/or open violence we experience on a daily basis whether we live on one side or the other of the geo-political border.