Monday, July 7, Carlos González Guérrez, the consul general of Mexico in Los Angeles, was about to start his weekly Public hearing When he heard a helicopter flying above. He started as usual, welcoming around twenty or twenty-five members of the community, who had presented himself to the third and busiest of the consulate to share their concerns and ask questions. These days, they almost all want to discuss immigration raids in the city and what the consulate can do to protect Mexican citizens. As the rally continued, González Guérrez heard, above the helicopter, noisy voices and general agitation outside. He kept talking, standing in front of a Mexican flag and an orange brilliant wall sporting the official Mexico seal.
When the event ended, his assistant consul general approached him and held his phone, who played videos of beige military trucks, federal horse officers on horseback, the demonstrators shouted and the mayor Karen Bass saying that the officers had to leave. González Guérrez realized that the melee took place in MacArthur park, directly in front of the consulate. He returned to the microphone he had used for the audience And said that an immigration raid happened. He did not want to panic, but he invited everyone inside the building to stay there, and everyone outside – people who queue for their appointments, sellers selling food and small Mexican flags – to come. They would be safe there, he told them. The consulate is inviolable under international law, a sanctuary in the city of Los Angeles.
While the federal agents were still in the park, González Guérrez returned to his office on the fifth floor, where a window wall offered the best point of view to look at what was going on in the streets below. The press teams were on the scene, broadcasting at viewers across the country. It was the same with activists, who tried to document each raid and published videos and photos on social networks.
Immigration and customs application had apprehended hundreds of Mexicans in Los Angeles in recent weeks, but he has not taken a single person that day in MacArthur park, suggesting that his presence was intended for a demonstration of force. Federal agents announced that they were leaving shortly after the arrival of Mayor Bass. González Guérrez found the whole episode “amazing”, he told me. “I did not expect to attend an operation such as that that everyone saw in MacArthur park – because of what MacArthur Park represents, because of what Los Angeles represents, due to the deployment of forces by the border patrol.”
González Guérrez, born in Mexico City, spent twenty-eight of his sixty and a year in the United States. After graduating from El Colegio de México with a diploma in international relations, he signed up at the Instituto Matías Romero, the school of foreign services that the Mexican grass diplomats are required to attend. While he was there, he received authorization from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to participate in an international higher education program at the University of Southern California, where he studied with an expert in American-American relations appointed Abe Lowenthal. The year was in 1988. The Dodgers beat the Oakland Athletics in the World Series. González Guérrez has become a fan of the city and his baseball team.
Lowenthal gave him advice that shaped the rest of his professional life, told me González Guérrez. “If I were you,” he recalls Lowenthal saying, “I would try to focus my career on the Mexican community in the United States.” Conflicts in Central America, the force of the peso, the severity of the drug trafficking problem: all this fluctuated over time, predicted Lowenthal. But Mexican communities in the United States would still be at the top of the list of foreign policy priorities in Mexico. This is more or less that the events took place.
When González Guérrez finished at the USC, he returned to Mexico City to finish the program at Matías Romero, and he became a junior officer with a foreign service. Not long in work, he received a telephone call from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fernando Solana Morales, who told him that Lowenthal was interested in continuing to work on a research project on the links between California and Mexico, so he would have returned to Los Angeles, to help his former professor and become the first business consul. González Guérrez also thinks that he was sent to Los Angeles because the United States and Mexico negotiated the North American free trade agreement: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs knew that Mexico needed to build its consular network in the United States. González Guérrez has a memory of these years hanging on the wall in his office, alongside paintings of bull fighting and photos with us and Mexican dignitaries: a ticket for the screws without sure blow by the Dodger Pheom Fernando Valenzuela, against St. Louis Cardinals, against St. Louis Cardinals. Valenzuela had signed him for him.
During this period in Los Angeles, González Guérrez said to me: “You could see how important Mexican communities were, or were already, for the social fabric of the city. But it was nothing like it would become. ” In November 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which included a so -called amnesty provision that gave undocumented persons, including the Mexicans, a path to citizenship. Almost two and a half million, the Mexicans obtained legal status following the IRCA, including more than half a million in the County of Los Angeles. In the mid -90s, the Mexican population of the Grand Los Angeles was held at around four million individuals, which makes it The largest outside Mexico.
The new immigration law has made many Mexicans feel like they had a more stable base in Los Angeles, allowing them to settle. As explained by a 2011 USC researchers’ report, Mexicans who arrived in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and asked for legalization through IRCA provisions, formed an increasing part of Los Angeles labor, graduate of secondary at higher rates than previous generations of Mexican immigrants, bought hopes higher median income.
According to González Guérrez, it is the Mexican immigrants who, for various reasons, could not benefit from the IRCA which were the most affected by the recent ICE raids. Their children and grandchildren born in the United States lead resistance against filming. “They are the ones who protest to protect their parents and wave the Mexican flag to honor this part of their identity,” he told me.
A few years after the signing of IRCA, González Guérrez witnessed the riots launched by the blows of Rodney King. He recalled the racial tensions of this period, especially between African-Americans and Mexican and recently arrived from Mexican and Central Immigrants who moved to the South Center. Since the Mexican consulate, he said, he could see “fires everywhere, five or six columns of smoke rising in the sky at the same time”. González Guérrez also witnessed the campaign in 1994 to pass the 187 proposal, a voting initiative which sought to reduce the benefits of the public to undocumented immigrants. (The measurement was approved by a large margin – less than sixty percent of the voters supported it, but blocked by a federal judge.) On October 16, 1994, Los Angeles Times Directed a photograph of the demonstrations against the voting initiative, showing avenue Cesar Chavez, named after the co-founder of the United Farm Workers Union, wrapped with Angelenos flying Mexican flags. Exactly thirty years after the publication of the photo, González Guérrez organized a ceremony at the consulate, in which he unveiled a large framed reprint. He said that the birthday was special for him because he marked California’s dramatic turnaround: “A state that was the avant-garde of the anti-immigrant movement had become the avant-garde of the pro-immigrant movement in the United States.”
