A young man walks past a burning car. In his hands: four flags, one of them Mexican. Smoke drifts over the asphalt, voices echo against the city’s walls. It is June 9, 2025, in Los Angeles – a day like a historical crossroads, a protest against deportation raids, a cry against uniforms, a storm of symbols made of fabric and meaning. In the days following Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and Marines, the city has become a burning lens. And at the center of this heat: a wave of green, white, and red flags. Mexican flags, raised by those whose history on this land began long before it was called “America.”
For some conservatives, this sight is an affront. The Mexican flag at a protest on American soil? To them, a sign of rejection, even hostility. Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, calls the demonstrators “left-wing radicals” allegedly defending violent, criminal illegals. Even Adam Kinzinger, a Republican and Trump critic, expresses discomfort. “American flags or nothing,” he writes on X. But this reading misses the depth, flattens history into ideology. Because what flies here are not foreign flags – they are memories, identities, heirlooms. The Mexican flag represents not just origin, but belonging – for people who didn’t cross a border, but whose homeland was crossed by one. California was once Mexico. The lines on the map shifted – the people remained.
Historian Kris Hernández puts it aptly: the flag is a form of visibility, a protest symbol against erasure. And it is part of a polyphonic narrative about America – about a country that was never homogeneous, but always made up of stories that had to coexist, and sometimes collided. Amid the debate, a new symbolism is emerging: the reclaiming of the American flag itself. More and more demonstrators are carrying the Stars and Stripes alongside the green, white, and red. Not as contradiction, but as reconciliation. “We are America,” they say. Not as a slogan, but as a fact. Héctor Sánchez of “Mi Familia Vota” puts it plainly: “If Confederate flags are allowed to fly next to U.S. flags – why not the Mexican one?” His question lingers in the air like a silent indictment of a double standard.
What is happening in Los Angeles is more than a protest. It is a battle over America’s image – over the right to be part of a history so often denied. And in this history, a flag is not just cloth. It is voice, wound, pride. And sometimes a fire that makes truth visible.
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