“We have many options for Venezuela,” Donald Trump said last month, “and by the way, I’m not going to rule out a military option.” The last time the US deployed its military to Latin America was 1989, when it invaded Panama to topple the dictator Manuel Noriega, a relatively easy operation for the global hegemon one month after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Today, what for decades sounded like a hollow threat from the odd American congressmen, or a boilerplate warning in the speeches of leftist despots, has become a real possibility.
Ironically, were the United States to launch an attack on Venezuela, it would do so from within Latin America. Puerto Rico hosts a US naval training base in the island of Vieques, and in the last months the US sent guided missile cruisers, fighter jets and warships, along with 4,500 sailors and 2,000 marines to the island. The US secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, visited two weeks ago.
Puerto Rico is, of course, a colony of the United States, and has been since the US conquered the island over 100 years ago. Its legal status vis-à-vis the United States remains ambiguous: it is an “unincorporated territory” and a “free associated state”, murky designations which, if nothing else, mean that the island is not a normal American state and that its citizens do not have a vote in Congress nor in the electoral college. Nevertheless, Puerto Rico is US soil and, therefore, a place for the US military to park its hardware. Its connection to Puerto Rico is one of several reasons why, properly speaking, the United States itself should be considered a Latin American nation, at least in part.
Last week, the National Football League announced that the reggaeton star Bad Bunny would play the half-time show during this season’s Super Bowl on 8 February – the biggest stage in American entertainment. Republican influencers protested the choice, and some threatened to boycott the half-time show, if not the Super Bowl itself. The problem with Bad Bunny is that he hates Trump, or that he’s a “demonic Marxist”. But Bad Bunny is also Puerto Rican and sings in Spanish, and it’s likely that these are big reasons the choice was protested by Maga diehards, who were reminded of a few facts that complicate their world-view: that Puerto Rico is American territory, and Puerto Ricans like Bad Bunny are American citizens, even if many do not speak English.
The United States is the product of Spanish as well as English colonists. American schoolchildren generally learn that the US has three birthdays. First, in 1607 with the arrival of English tobacco growers in Jamestown. Then in 1620 when the Puritans landed on Plymouth Rock. And third, in 1776 with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Whatever its flaws, the basic idea behind the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times six years ago last month, was a good one: to recognise black Americans as part of the American story by observing a fourth American birthday, however dark: in the year 1619, when the first slave ship arrived in the British colonies.
You could add a fifth birthday to the list, too: in 1565, the year that the first European settlement was founded on present-day US soil – a town called St Augustine in Florida, originally a Spanish colony. (Incidentally, there were black slaves in St Augustine decades before 1619.) As far as I know, no one has come up with a “1565 Project”. But Donald Trump’s immigration policies are making one necessary.
Take the latest recruitment ads for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees Ice, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. “Defend your culture!” says one. Which culture? An answer can be found in another DHS ad, which contains a famous picture, American Progress by John Gast. A giant woman in a white gown, the personification of progress, reminiscent of the Greek goddess Athena, leads the way for the westward march of white American settlers, telegraph lines and locomotives, while native people retreat in fear. The image is a famous illustration of Manifest Destiny, an idea conceived on the eve of the American annexation of Texas and the war with Mexico.
Along with Manifest Destiny and the Mexican War, the Maga world-view often alludes to the 1898 Spanish-American War. In his second inaugural address, Trump cited President William McKinley, who “made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent”. McKinley was the same president who won the war against Spain and conquered Puerto Rico and the Philippines, while making a protectorate out of Cuba. Also on Inauguration Day, Trump issued an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
Eventually, even the most loyal Hispanic Trump voter (and there are many of them; Trump almost won the Hispanic vote) will see that Trump’s tough-on-immigration stance, however justifiable in their eyes, is fuelled by an ideology that ignores the Hispanic roots of the United States. It is an ideology that sees the US as a nation state like Greece or Ireland, rather than a polyglot entity like Belgium or Canada, or the raucous, world-straddling empire that it really is. The (largely symbolic) executive order designating English as the official language of the United States; the sabre rattling with Venezuela and Mexico; the detention of Hispanic immigrants outside of schools and churches; the setting up of checkpoints in Washington and Los Angeles: all of these policies can be partly explained according to a traditional Republican law-and-order rationale, or as pushback – demanded by voters – against illegal immigration and drug cartels. Still, another ideology is also driving these policies, a nationalist one embodied in those DHS ads, and pushes them to extremes.
The extremism is becoming easier to see. Stories abound of the ways in which deportations have wounded longstanding communities. In the past few weeks, the Hispanic neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant in Washington DC became a showcase of Ice patrols. A friend who lives there describes the scene:
“ICE has set up checkpoints outside my street most mornings – pulling people out of cars usually around 7am. They have repeatedly showed up to a Catholic elementary school and another school down the block from me, also staging drug arrests at this same time as kids are going to school. This means Ice, HHS, MPD and other units with battering rams and long guns blocking the sidewalk while kids walk through them to go to school… They have occupied streets, schools, posted up at churches, and again used checkpoints to restrain people without, from what has been observed, actually even running all their details. They’ve been heard to say, ‘We will bring him back in a few hours if he’s actually good, we’re just going to take him away for a while.’ They’ve also sat outside of small businesses and mutual aid pop ups in the plaza, stopping people from shopping or getting in line for food due to fear of being detained.”
And yet, despite these disturbances, stubborn American reality persists. Two months after English became America’s official language, I went to a Bank of America in New York and spoke to the teller in Spanish. There are stretches of the US with deep ties to Latin America – to places once conquered by President McKinley – that are fully integrated into American life.
In 1883, Walt Whitman, the American national poet, wrote: “We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents… They will be found ampler than has been supposed and in widely different sources. Thus far… we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashioned from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only – which is a great mistake.” He adds: “To that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts.”
Whitman wrote this in a letter to an organisation in New Mexico, sending his regrets that he could not accept its invitation to recite a poem on the 333rd anniversary of the founding of the city of Santa Fe. But Whitman might have written the same thing to a similar group in Florida, or Puerto Rico, or south-east Texas, or California, lands settled by the Spanish but long ago incorporated into the United States. On one occasion, back in 2019, Trump seemed to recognise this, and basically channelled Whitman: “Hispanic Americans have been a big part of our national story from the very, very beginning of our country.” But that was one of his more scripted moments.
When I think about Trump’s attitude toward Hispanics, it’s not Whitman that comes to mind but Edgar Allan Poe. In his short story “William Wilson”, Poe explores the psychological effects of meeting one’s double. The Anglo-American and the Hispanic experience each other as a mysterious double. Both are the products of European colonisation; both, by and large, come from Christian ancestors; and both are American.
Poe’s story depicts a man named William Wilson, whose life is haunted by a mysterious double, a schoolmate with the same birthday, “the same name; the same contour of person”. The resemblance between Wilson and his double isn’t only physical, for the two Wilsons are intimately connected on a non-verbal, psychic level. This is the fundamental difference between the European refugee crisis and the US border wars: the European crisis takes place along an ancient civilisational cleavage, between Rome and the East, or Christian Europe and the Ottomans, or what have you. The problem over here is that there are two sides who pretend they are more different from each other than they really are.
This is especially true of Trump himself, whose leadership style is more like that of a Latin American caudillo strongman than a pious Methodist and lawyer like William McKinley. The original Wilson is a bully and a conman, who dominates and swindles his peers. Yet his double can disturb Wilson’s conscience with a mere word or glance, and Wilson can’t subdue him. Wilson has a “a heterogeneous mixture” of feelings about his double: “some petulant animosity, which was not yet hatred, some esteem, more respect, much fear, with a world of uneasy curiosity”.
For the most part, Trump’s public comments about Hispanics are also a heterogeneous mixture, ranging from patronising to insulting. “The best taco bowls are made in the Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!” (2016). “Sometimes they’re too tough. But that’s OK. I have to deal with it. Fantastic people” (2017). “These people do it naturally” (referring to Hispanic farm workers, 2025). Even his infamous 2015 remarks end with a concession: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
You can’t imagine him saying: “Some are my people.” But they are, whether he likes it or not.
[Further reading: Bari Weiss’s American fairy tale]
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