To the editor: Gustavo Arellano’s latest 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 position 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 area 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 isn’t 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 in some way a cultural rallying cry as an alternative of what it’s: reckless and inflammatory.
What’s equally troubling is UCLA’s silence. Gonzalez was not too long ago named director of a program there that trains educators. If she continues to carry that title it will ship a chilling message: that incendiary, harmful rhetoric is excusable if it’s cloaked in the appropriate cultural language — and that’s a regular no establishment of integrity ought to stand behind.
If Arellano desires to champion communities like mine, he ought to cease filtering them via sentimentality and begin confronting what’s actual: Gonzalez’s phrases aren’t misunderstood. They’re unacceptable. And his spin solely makes them extra so.
Migdia Chinea, Glendale
