Opinion: How the invisibility of Latinx people in media is enabling Trump’s bigotry

It was a time of economic struggle and xenophobia. Sitting in the White House was a businessman who had never before held public office. His slogan and rallying cry was unsubtle and racially coded: “American jobs for real Americans.”

His name was not Donald Trump, but Herbert Hoover. And, like Trump, he followed up on his threats. During the Great Depression, the Hoover administration, in order to create jobs for “real” Americans, started a policy in 1929 that illegally and unconstitutionally deported 1.8 million Latino men, women and children, 60% of whom were U.S. citizens. The vast majority were given no due process. One of them was my grandfather, Incarnación Nava.

Incarnación was a refugee who fled the violence of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and journeyed to el norte — the United States. He was granted asylum and became a legal resident the same year. He worked in a smelting factory, lived here for more than 20 years, got married and started a large family, which was forever shattered by his unjust deportation in 1931.