Remezcla — a popular media brand with audiences in the US, Latin America, and Spain — has announced it will no longer cover Donald Trump.
Instead, Remezcla will report on the nationwide mobilization efforts against the Republican Presidential nominee.
Editor-in-Chief Andrea Gompf writes:
Unfortunately, I have come to feel that our Donald Trump stories – which have ranged from flippant rebukes to outraged editorials – often do little more than bounce away into the endless echo chamber of the internet. Trump has said horrible, morally offensive things throughout his campaign, and these words have led to tangible acts of violence against Latinos and people of color all over the country. We (along with plenty of journalists) have steadily condemned him. Yet he’s all but clinched the nomination not despite this stuff, but because of it.
For this reason, we’ve decided we will no longer be giving any space on Remezcla to Donald Trump’s grotesque sideshow. Instead, we’ll be using our platform exclusively to highlight the resistance, activism and mobilization of those working to oppose Trump – from the California high school students who won the right to wear “Dump Trump” T-shirts to school, to the Latino workers at the Las Vegas Trump International Hotel fighting to unionize, to the Latinx anti-Trump activists raising money by selling “Make America Mexico Again” hats.
We’ve previously noted the very real problem of some in the media glossing over the racial resentment that makes up a lot of Trump’s campaign.
But as Gompf mentioned, Remezcla and others have done some notable reporting on the effects of the racist and anti-worker platforms (among many other things) of his campaign, particularly The Guardian.
Earlier this month, The Guardian noted a group of Latin@ youth who won their fight to wear “Dump Trump” shirts to high school.
The students wore the shirts in response to racist “chalkings” on their campus, but were then told by school administrators they could not wear the shirts:
Since last fall, Newport Harbor students who are Trump supporters have worn their politics on their T-shirts at school, which is 38% Latino and 52% white. But Angelina and her friends became particularly alarmed last week when anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican, derogatory graffiti was chalked throughout the campus including the words “fuck illegal aliens”, “wetbacks” and a heart drawn alongside Trump’s name.
“With Donald Trump, [students] are more open about their hate and the things they say,” Angelina said.
After the anti-Trump protests last week, where one of Angelina’s 13-year-old friends was choked and punched, the Latino students had had enough – she and half a dozen of her friends wore Dump Trump T-shirts to school on Friday to make their feelings known.
But the school was not happy.
At the end of her math class a security guard showed up. The principal, Sean Boulton, wanted to see Angelina in the main office – and he wanted her to change out of the Dump Trump shirt.
Boulton insisted that they remove the shirts for their own safety. But that argument didn’t make sense to the students, who felt they were being held to a double standard.
After all, their Trump-supporting classmates had worn their pro-Trump shirts on campus since the start of the school year.
“They’ve worn the shirts all this time, and we wear a shirt for one period and we get called up right away,” Angelina said. “It’s not like we’re doing anything violent. We’re just standing up for ourselves.”
For Angelina and her classmates, the issue went beyond T-shirts. They told administrators that the derogatory graffiti, some of it still visible on Friday, and other incidents on campus, such as verbal harassment, had made them feel like they were under attack.
Boulton said the school had addressed the graffiti by removing it but was unaware that other students had targeted and harassed Angelina and her classmates with racial slurs.
“There’s certainly a lot of things that go on on campus that are inappropriate … and as information surfaces we don’t just ignore it. We react and we’re proactive in trying to resolve it,” Boulton said.
Additionally, a new video also from The Guardian reveals employees from the Donald Trump’s hotel in Las Vegas are being exploited, overworked, and underpaid by the billionaire.
According to the video, employees at the Trump International Hotel — many of whom are among the very Latino immigrants he has attacked throughout his Presidential campaign — make $3 less on average than the rest of casino and hotel workers along the Las Vegas strip.
When many of these hotel employees voted to form a union, hotel management refused to negotiate a contract with them.
Several employees were even fired on the spot after attempting to wear campaign buttons to work.
“They don’t respect the workers’ rights,” says Celia, a housekeeper at the hotel, in the video. “We asked for permission to go to the doctor, they deny it to us. If we work overtime, they take hours from my schedule on the next day so they don’t have to pay me overtime. I always end up paying more or having to get loans or selling something of mine to get ahead.”
