Steffani Traskos

Article C
December 6, 2016
Growing up in Southwest, sometimes I didnt want to be Mexican, says Southwest
Detroit native Angel Mendoza.
Mendoza says he attended Cesar Chavez Academy for his highschool education where
students are required to fulfill 200 community service hours in order graduate.
Thats something you wont see in the media about Hispanic schools, he says.
He says, The biggest things media portrays about Latinos are of the bad. They dont
show the positives about our culture like our strong sense of family or our commitment to
faith.
In the 2012 New York Times article, For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture
Than Color, author Mireya Navarro says the Latino population holds a fundamentally
different view of race.
Latinos tend to identify themselves more by their ethnicity, meaning a shared set of
cultural traits, Navarro says.
Southwest may not be the best neighborhood, but all the families watch each others
backs, Mendoza says, We try to take care of each other.
In the 2012 Community Research Trends article, Hispanics-and-Latinos and the U.S.
Media: New Issues for Future Research, authors Santiago Arias and Lea Hellmueller say
in 2016, the Hispanic population represents roughly 17% of the total U.S. population,
which constitutes the largest minority population in the country.
Arias and Hellmueller say, news media content featuring Hispanics and Latinos affects
the general perception and provokes discrimination against [them] such as unfair
immigration policies or negatives attitudes and judgments against the minority.
The discourse consists of promoting the idea that crime and undocumented immigrants,
and the costs of illegal immigration in social services and taxes directly result from the
increase of Hispanics-and-Latinos in the United States, says Arias and Hellmueller.
They say that contrary to media portrayal, studies conducted at Harvard and Michigan
showed that undocumented and foreign-born immigrants were far less likely to commit
acts of deviance, crime, drunk driving, or any kind of action that may jeopardize U.S.
denizens' well-being.
In the New York Times article, A Wave of Harassment After Trumps Victory, author
Anna North says, hundreds of incidents of harassment and intimidation have

been reported across the country since Election Day.

North says, In Koylton Township, Mich., a Mexican-American family woke to find a
wall made of cardboard boxes blocking their driveway. The boxes and driveway were
defaced with graffiti with references to Donald Trump.
Mendoza says the election of Donald Trump for the U.S. presidency has driven a divide
between documented and undocumented Latinos living in Detroit.
Mendoza says, Theres conflict and camaraderie within the Hispanic
community. Although there is a rift, today Latinos are banding together to combat
racism brought out by the election.