We all saw the video of California Senator Alex Padilla being strong-armed out of press conference room, taken out to the hallway, shoved face-down onto the floor and handcuffed behind his back. We saw how he clearly stated his name as they shoved him out the door, “I’m … Senator … Alex .. Padilla,” as he gasped for breath. No matter, they man-handled him out and treated him like he was a menacing felon escaping a federal prison.
I met Alex Padilla (then California’s Secretary of State) in 2019 at the Cesar Chavez Legacy Awards where one of one of the professionals in our documentary short film The Migrant Child Farmworkers – Now High-Profile Professionals ©, Dr. Ramon Resa, gave the keynote speech. Tall, soft-spoken and focused on me, Alex and I had a meaningful, if short, conversation.
The violent takedown and seeming arrest must have been especially traumatic for him as he knew first-hand what it meant to be told to get down on the ground having grown up in Pacoima, a tough part of LA.
The result? Alex Padilla was being told he can’t – no matter what he has accomplished, he was triggered into thinking that he’s still perceived as a Latino kid who is maybe a member of MS-13.
As if that weren’t enough, JD Vance then marginalized Alex further by calling him José,
I was hoping José Padilla would be here to ask a question. But unfortunately I guess he decided not to show up because there wasn’t a theater.
Gustavo Arellano’s piece in the LA Times, “We’re all just a bunch of Josés’“, outlines why this name is part of anti-Latino history rather than an accidental “slip of the tongue”; he quoted experts like San Diego State’s English professor William Nericcio who said:
The vice president was proclaiming to Sen. Padilla, ‘Yeah, I know you. I don’t even remember your name. That’s how little you mean. You’re a José. You’re a nothing, a nobody, a dirty Mexican.’
Gustavo mentions Josés he admires — Cuban revolutionary José Martí, Mexican singer-songwriter José Alfredo Jiménez, farmworker-turned-astronaut José M. Hernández. I’d add humanitarian José Andrés to that list. José Alamillo, chair of Chicana/o Studies at Cal State Channel Islands, also interviewed, said that the harassment he faced growing up in Ventura as a Mexican immigrant was so severe that he went by the name Joe through high school and only started calling himself José again at UC Santa Barbara. Central Valley’s Dr. Ramon Resa, a former migrant child farm worker featured in The Migrant Child Farmworkers, had an experience very similar to Alamillo’s; he was ridiculed for his name so he went by Ray in high school and only at UC Santa Cruz did he start calling himself Ramon again.
If they could take down Senator Padilla—a man who was the son of immigrants, a father who was a short-order cook, a mother who cleaned houses, first in his family to go to college (MIT and major in engineering at that) and went on to be a leader of the fourth largest economy of the world—they can do this to anyone. We must fight the negative narratives that are leading to outrageous mistreatment and marginalization. Why? Because, maybe, if given an opportunity, kids like Alex once was can grow up to become Senators, engineers, medical researchers or other professionals who can achieve their dreams and rightly feel the respect they deserve.