Donald Trump’s Wrong. Mexicans Aren’t Going to Rape You.

Politico Magazine (Opinion)

By Gustavo Arellano

July 8, 2015

Donald Trump’s Wrong. Mexicans Aren’t Going to Rape You. 

Demonizing Mexicans as rapists is a time-honored tradition of American letters and politics. The idea that hombres are fundamentally devious perverts hell-bent on violating the honor of white and Mexican women alike is soldered on the American psyche—even though it’s based on goddamn lies.

This canard gained national prominence recently when Donald Trump angered any American with a soul after saying, “When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best...They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.” But his stereotyping of Mexicans as sexual predators wasn’t original. Ann Coulter boasted on Twitter “all that spicy stuff about Mexican rape culture came from” her giving Trump an advance copy of her book, ¡Adiós, America! And she wasn’t even the first unfunny blonde to trot out that tired line: in 2013, comedienne-of-the-moment Amy Schumer joked, “I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual.”

The three were late to the raza rape game, though, one long led by members of the House of Representatives. In 2007, Dana Rohrabacher, the whack-job representative from Orange County who once supported the Taliban (you can look it up!), stated from the floor of Congress, “If you get raped or murdered or run over by a drunk in California in my area, it’s likely it’s been done by someone who should never have been there legally in the first place”—code for the Mexican immigrants who live in his district. The year before, Texas congressman Ted Poe told his colleagues “illegals in this country contribute a vast over-percentage of violent crime and street crime, from theft to rape to murder.” That same year Iowa Congressman Steve King perversely celebrated Cinco de Mayo by writing in a newsletter that if undocumented immigrants weren’t in the U.S., “Eight American children [a day] would not suffer the horror as a victim of a sex crime.” Given those race-baiting comments, it’s no surprise that King recently came out in support of Trump, saying he “appreciates [his] scrappiness.”

Latinos can—and better—rage at the cheap political points earned by sliming Mexicans with the rapist stereotype. And the best way to do it is with the truth: A 2011 U.S. Government Accountability Office study “Criminal Alien Statistics: Information on Incarcerations, Arrests and Costs” found that of the three million arrests of immigrants, legal or not, examined by investigators, only two percent were for sex offenses—two percent too many, but hardly an epidemic. It didn’t break down the ethnicity or legal status of the offenders, but the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey breaks down such stats by victims. For 2013 (the most recent year available), it shows that whites accounted for 71 percent of all sexual assaults documented (above their total percentage of 63 percent of the U.S. population), while Latinos accounted for 9 percent, far below their total percentage of 17 percent. And as a percentage of all “serious violent victimizations,” sexual assaults represent 11 percent of the violent crimes against Latinos. For gabachos? 18 percent. The BJS also noted that for the period from 2005-2010 about 66 percent of sexual assault victims knew their perp, and that whites had strangers commit violent victimizations against them at a rate of 9.2 per 1,000 people, compared to 9.8 per 1,000 for Latinos—so much for the notion of an army of faceless Mexicans stalking their fair-skinned prey.

For those who don’t comprende: white American citizens are far more rape-y than Mexicans can ever hope to become. Yet the lies about hordes of Mexican rapists perpetuated by Trump, Coulter and Schumer and so many others persist because they’re just engaging in good ol’ American paranoia about purity and the perpetual menace south of the border.

In Mexicans, Americans have a group of people on which to project their racial fears for the future. Congressman John C. Box said it best in 1930 when he told the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee, “No other alien race entering America provides an easier channel for the intermixture of blood than does the mongrel Mexican…their presence and intermarriage with both white and black races…create the most insidious and general mixture of white, Indian and negro blood strains ever produced in America.”

This race-mixing and horniness was already on the minds of Americans in their earliest encounters with Mexicans. Popular lore maintains the Texas rebels beat General Santa Anna in the Battle of San Jacinto because he was having sex with a captive African-American woman right before the battle. In The Prairie Scout; or, Agatone the Renegade. A Romance of Border Life, Charles Webber in 1852 wrote that Mexican women are “more loose and licentious than the men. It is not all astonishing, therefore, that the race should be so miserably degenerate.” C.E. Rodgers, in his 1881 Secret Sins of Societies, seemed to take pity on the indigenous that Cortés conquered by saying the “lecherous bigots...overran [Mexico] with a flood of Spanish cruelty and immorality like a stream of lava." But that just meant for the author that modern-day Mexicans possessed a "licentious selfishness and reckless cruelty.”

From shoddy social analysis and travelogues, the Mexi-molester meme jumped into popular culture. On the literary side, everyone from O. Henry to Zane Grey featured dirty Mexicans ready to deflower damsels Spanish and Saxon. Silent films in the 1910s, with telling titles like The Girl and the Greaser, The Greaser’s Gauntlet and Tony the Greaser set the template for the sweaty banditos that made the careers of early Western stars like Broncho Billy Anderson and Tom Mix. Those two-reelers, in turn, influenced Hollywood’s depiction of Mexicans for the rest of the 20th century, from the sex-crazed mobs of Orson Welles Touch of Evil looking to pervert the muy gabacha Janet Leigh to the bandits in ¡Three Amigos! who kidnap a gringo-loving señorita. Hell, even the name of Speedy Gonzalez, that most beloved Mexican icon of Old Hollywood, according to Chicano cultural critic William Anthony Nericcio in his fabulous examination of Mexican stereotypes, Tex{t}-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America, is based on a crude joke that involved a Mexican man afflicted with premature ejaculation.

All these fictional depictions set the stage for the rest of America to expect nothing but a fiesta of vice and defilement once Mexicans become their neighbors. And that panic makes it easy for pendejos to appeal to the darker side of the American mind in their endless quest for votes, sales and notoriety. I don’t see this myth going away any time soon, alas, but there is hope. The nationwide scorn for Trump at least tells us we’re on a road where polite society won’t take it anymore without massive protests and pushback. May Trump, Coulter, Schumer and anyone spewing such crap soon fester alongside the Confederate flag, Lou Dobbs and Chi Chi’s in this nation’s scrap heap of racial ideas more expired than days-old guacamole.

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