In one of the most interesting scenes of Hate Rising, the recently-released documentary by Univision and Fusion, Univision anchor Jorge Ramos interviews a roomful of mostly Mexican-American children in a Texas elementary school classroom. “What have you heard about the elections?” he asks the children, The kids clamor to answer him - “Donald Trump wants to build a wall;” “That he wants to send all the people not from here back to where they’re from.”
“Why?” Ramos asks.
“Well, my mom is from Mexico, so her family now has to all go over there.” she explains, shrugging almost matter-of-factly. “They’ll go back to Mexico.”
“They don’t have papers, the Mexicans,” says another girl.
“Are you afraid that your family will be separated?” Every child in the room nods somberly.
“I don’t want my grandma to go back to Mexico because she takes care of me,” says one boy, who begins to cry.
Donald Trump’s relentless demonization of Mexicans has sent a message to the young children of Mexican immigrants is that every single Mexican person in the country, regardless of legal status or citizenship, will be deported. The children are too young to fully grasp questions of citizenship and legality, so when Donald Trump promises to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and build a wall to keep them from returning, they believe that every Mexican in the country will be forced to leave.
These children’s fears are well founded. Beyond even Trump’s horrific rhetoric are the white supremacists and white nationalists who have taken Trump’s message as permission to come out of the woodwork to promote their messages of hatred and violence. The focus of Ramos’ film is these white supremacists, who he argues with in some scenes that are cringe worthy to watch. The film’s opening features Ramos arguing with a white supremacist who tells Ramos to his face that he thinks “whites are so much higher” than any other race. “But Latino isn’t a race—“ Ramos cuts in, to deaf ears. Later, Ramos interviews a homeless Mexican immigrant, Guillermo Rodríguez, who was beaten up and urinated on – and it is later revealed the attacked immigrant has cancer.
Trump has empowered this group of hateful Americans, who are the exception, not the rule, according to the film, and we must do everything possible to extinguish this hate by heading to the ballot box. Between now and November 8 at least, films that rely on scare tactics over deep political analysis do serve an important purpose. For those still somehow unconvinced that Trump would be worse for America than Clinton, understanding the depths of hatred and tendency towards violence of these Trump supporters, does have value.
For those still somehow unconvinced that Trump would be worse for America than Clinton, understanding the depths of hatred and tendency towards violence of these Trump supporters, does have value.
But Ramos’ analysis is oddly apolitical and dehistoricized, despite his expertise and long history working on behalf of pro-immigrant policies in the United States. Like Michael Moore’s recent surprise documentary, Trumpland, Ramos’ film has a political message that avoids complexity in favor of urgency. In the election frenzy, Ramos, seems to forget that tightening border security to keep out immigrants has been a multi-decade project pursued under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Despite the fact that Ramos grilled Barack Obama on his reputation as “deporter in chief,” this goes unmentioned in Hate Rising. He also makes no reference to the United States’ massive carceral system that has detained more immigrants than any country in the world.
These are issues that Ramos himself has rallied against as anchor for Univision, and as founder of Fusion, a millennial-targeted multimedia news and culture online platform that launched a television channel in 2014 and a website in 2015. Fusion is another media outlet offering a space for today’s explosion of web content, though it has yet to reach anywhere near the number of readers and viewers as Vice, The Huffington Post, or Vox. Over the past five to ten years, these online sources have created unprecedented opportunities for alternative media to reach a growing number of users across the Internet in record amounts of time. Vice News’ series on HBO covers topics the New York Times would never touch, and Fusion also has its own program on Univision, which has featured interviews the likes of Anne Coulter and Barack Obama. Hate Rising, the first documentary produced by Fusion and Univision, in this sense, misses an opportunity to establish Fusion as a source to watch, or to set itself apart from similar sources that are outperforming it. In addition to the oversimplified, dehistoricized analysis, the format of the film largely adheres to any Frontline PBS documentary.
That said, Ramos has taken on an admirable and necessary role through his journalistic work on the Trump campaign. He occupies a somewhat unique position in the media world. While his nightly news special draws 2 million viewers a night, has won eight Emmys and written 12 books, before last year he was largely unknown to English-language audiences. When he was kicked out of a Trump press event a year ago and told to “go back to Univision,” Ramos was catapulted into the role as an all-purpose representative of Trump’s xenophobia towards Mexicans. Since then, liberal English-language media has developed a bit of a crush: The Financial Times lauded him as a “rebel anchor,” and he was featured on the cover of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential people in 2015, with a reflection by Christiane Amanpour. The New Yorker published an article with the headline: “The Voice of Immigrant America?” Others were not so pleased. The Washington Post ran an article calling Ramos a “conflict junkie” on the same level as Trump, and a Politico reporter took to Twitter to say that Ramos’ personal agenda clearly breached journalistic objectivity.
Ramos has primarily used his figurehead-status for good— to raise awareness about pro-immigrant causes, but his role does raise some questions about the politics of representation, even among those on the left who share his sympathies. Ramos as a representative of Mexican immigrant America flouts all of Trump’s stereotypes about Mexicans– Ramos is an internationally successful, mega-wealthy U.S. citizen with unmistakably European features and blue eyes, a self-described “güerito” (Mexican slang for light-skinned).
Ramos as a representative of Mexican immigrant America flouts all of Trump’s stereotypes about Mexicans– Ramos is an internationally successful, mega-wealthy U.S. citizen with unmistakably European features and blue eyes, a self-described “güerito” (Mexican slang for light-skinned).
Despite his sympathy for immigration, he has been unsympathetic to anti-establishment leftist leaders like Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, who he has attempted – and not succeeded— to formally interview. He is an immigrant, but he is also a member of the elite media establishment. His daughter works on the Clinton campaign. He is a grade-A representative of the “good immigrant” narrative, the perfect hero for white liberal America to latch onto.
As a first-generation immigrant, Trump’s anti-immigrant slurs and threats are personal, as Ramos reflected on Twitter after he was kicked out of the Trump conference. But Ramos does not represent the voices of the millions of indigenous-descendant immigrants working in exploitative and underpaid working conditions, for whom deportation is a daily threat, with or without Trump. Unlike figures like José Antonio Vargas, the undocumented Filipino lawyer, or the undocumented students like Felipe Baeza and the McCain 5, Ramos does not put himself at personal legal risk by speaking out against xenophobes like Trump.
However, going head to head with white supremacists does constitute some level of physical threat, if not by deportation than by attacks of retribution. In an interview with María Hinojosa, host of NPR’s LatinoUSA podcast, Ramos says that because he looks white, he was able to attend various KKK rallies without drawing attention to himself, but if he were to speak, he would instantly become a target due to his noticeable Mexican accent.
Ramos’ role is a delicate balance, and in Hate Rising this balancing act is on full display. On the one hand, he is using his position and privilege to advocate for other immigrants who do not have a media or political platform, but at times he seems to put himself center stage. His interviewees seem to function as examples and not fully fleshed out characters in their own right. In this sense, he falls into the trap that, for example, Gael García Bernal fell into in Who is Dayani Cristal, a 2014 documentary about the search for a woman who disappeared on the migrant trail in Northern Mexico. In the film, García Bernal goes incognito to track Dayani’s path. As Kenji Fujishima wrote for Slant Magazine, “Bernal's attempt at empathy is admirable in theory, [but] in practice this turns out to be a classic case of star power distracting us from the film's deeper issues by drawing undue attention to the star himself.”
Like Ramos, García Bernal uses his celebrity for a good cause, but is in part sidelining the stories of the true victims of anti-immigrant policy. Though Ramos does not go that far, it bears wondering how a film about Guillermo Rodríguez, the homeless Mexican immigrant with cancer that Ramos interviewed, might be more compelling than Hate Rising. On the other hand, perhaps Rodríguez is too much of a “bad immigrant” to appear sympathetic to establishment America.
But, if even an internationally successful, millionaire U.S. citizen with blue eyes is still too Mexican to ask a question at a press event, then how deep does Trump’s xenophobia go? And to what degree has he unleashed the hateful and violent tendencies of white supremacy? As the film shows, quite a lot. In interviews with neo-nazis, KKK members, and white nationalists, Ramos’ subjects invoke Trump’s name as one might invoke Jesus. In a community meeting in Texas, one woman claims that “if your son comes home with his mixed-breed child, and you accept it and welcome it into your home, you are part of the problem,” to cheers. To her, biracial children are akin to objects, not people.
Such scenes drive home the point that Trump has empowered a great wave of hate throughout this country, as well as the urgency of ensuring that the voices of hate are not given space or legitimacy. But in doing so, Ramos perhaps gives Trump too much credit. Before Trump was former Arizona governor Jan Brewer’s SB-1070, which gave all police officers permission to ask any “suspicious-looking” person for identification. Before Trump were the two million people deported under Obama. Before Trump was the Secure Communities program which made deportation the de facto immigration policy in this country. Before Trump was the Republican-controlled Senate’s refusal to pass immigration reform in 2014.
A consequence of the 2016 Presidential Elections is the way that the urgency of ensuring Trump is not elected has obfuscated many of the political subtleties that have shaped the injustices of contemporary U.S. life. This has meant that even the most important and relevant media figures to social justice causes have in many ways put in-depth political analysis on the backburner to make a case to the millions of voters who still see Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as equally evil.
But after Trump is defeated, will Ramos and other media figures be able to maintain momentum among a wide audience against anti-immigrant policies? Or will these issues fall out of the popular eye, as supporting Latin@s becomes less of a political strategy. Viewers of the film without any specialized interest in immigration may erroneously think that keeping Trump out of office is the endgame— and this could have dangerous consequences.