To the editor: Gustavo Arellano’s current column within the Los Angeles Occasions 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 battle 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 avenue gangs — with lengthy histories of homicide, extortion and drug trafficking — to take up house and energy in opposition to federal brokers. That’s not protest. That’s incitement.
My dad and mom owned a 7/11 on the nook of Figueroa and Ave. 52 for 35 years and had direct expertise in coping with the Avenues gangs. It was a terrifying downside for them, and gang tradition will not be one thing to be glorified.
As an alternative 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 “defend” their neighborhoods is someway 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 might 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 needs 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
