The opinion column below first appeared in the Washington Post on June 14, 2025. World-Outlook publishes it for the information of our readers. We think it tackles an important cultural dimension of the recent protests in Los Angeles against the Trump administration’s intensified wave of workplace raids and deportations of undocumented immigrants.

The headline, subhead, photo, and text below are taken from the original. The endnote is by World-Outlook.

— World-Outlook editors

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Opinion

Why we fly the Mexican flag at the L.A. protests

What unsettles people isn’t the flag itself; it’s what it reveals about being American.

June 14, 2025

By Enrique Acevedo

Enrique Acevedo is anchor of the news program “En Punto” on Televisa.^[1]

I was there as protesters flooded the streets of downtown Los Angeles, their chants rising over sirens and the buzz of low-flying helicopters. The air was thick with smoke, and the sharp, acrid sting of chemicals burned the throat and made eyes water. Loud bangs echoed off concrete buildings, followed by the thud of rubber bullets hitting pavement and bodies. A wall of L.A. police officers stood unmoving at the edge of the crowd. And above it all, in the chaos and confrontation, was a sea of raised fists and Mexican flags. Not tucked in a pocket or painted on a cheek, but unfurled and waving high, as if daring the city, the country, to see them.

We know what came next. The outrage. The backlash. Not discomfort, but anger. Real, visceral anger. For many, seeing the Mexican flag waved during a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement doesn’t just raise eyebrows; it feels like an affront. They ask: If you’re demanding rights in this country, why wave the flag of another? But that flag, at that moment, is not about rejecting the United States. It’s about refusing to be erased. It’s layered with history, memory and defiance. It calls into question who we are as a country and, more important, who we’re willing to include. It forces a reckoning with a national identity far more complicated than many are ready to admit.

At a time when immigration is no longer merely debated but wielded as a tool to stoke fear, consolidate power and dehumanize an essential part of our society, and when the political cost of empathy has grown prohibitively high, moments like this don’t just spark controversy; they become crucibles. They force us to confront questions without easy answers: Who truly belongs in this country? And at what cost? Can American identity contain this kind of complexity, or is belonging still tethered to silence, assimilation and the quiet erasure of everything that doesn’t conform?

Los Angeles is the perfect place to ask these questions because Mexican identity isn’t foreign there. It’s foundational. This was Mexico once and remains part of the memory, culture, street names, food and families who never crossed a border because the border crossed them. In that context, the Mexican flag isn’t necessarily a symbol of separation or rejection. Sometimes, it’s a claim: We are both. We are Mexican and American, not divided but layered. This is what our identity looks like.

As someone shaped by both countries, I’ve lived most of my life inside that tension. And still, that space between two nations, two asymmetrical worlds, each imprinting me in ways that didn’t always align, never felt like a void. Instead, it connected me to millions of others with the same layered identity. More than 37 million people of Mexican origin live in the United States and more than 11 million in California alone. For many of us, being both and neither isn’t a contradiction. It’s a truth and a reflection of belonging in a country still learning to embrace more than one story at a time.

But American pluralism has never been as open-armed as we pretend. It often tolerates presence but punishes visibility. Mexican Americans are deemed essential when the country needs labor — in the fields, in hospitals during the covid pandemic, in our homes, in our schools and in the armed forces — but suspicious when they demand dignity, political voice or the freedom to show pride in where they come from. The message has always been: Contribute, but don’t complicate.

That contradiction runs deep. We’ve seen it before, during the Bracero Program, when Mexican workers were invited in to fill labor shortages even as Mexican American citizens were being attacked in the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots. We saw it again with Operation Wetback in the 1950s, when more than 1 million people, including U.S. citizens, were deported after they were no longer considered “useful.” And we see it today in how we praise Latino resilience and family values in one breath, how we celebrate essential workers, and then we break up those very families and remove those workers with the next deportation order. Too often, Latinos become proxies for a much larger, more uncomfortable reckoning over race, identity and political power in America.

So, when someone waves the Mexican flag in the streets of L.A., it strikes a nerve. But maybe what unsettles people isn’t the flag itself; it’s what it reveals. It confronts us with a complexity we still struggle to accept: that being American doesn’t require being less of anything else. That pride in your roots doesn’t cancel your claim to this country. That loving where you are doesn’t mean forgetting where you’re from.

After all, no one objects when the Irish flag is flown on St. Patrick’s Day or when many other flags are paraded down city streets each summer. Those moments are seen as safe, sanctioned as the “right” kind of ethnic pride. But when that same pride surfaces in protest, when it carries grief, frustration and a demand for recognition, it suddenly feels unruly and out of place, as if visibility becomes acceptable only when it poses no challenge to the dominant narrative. We must move past the false choice between assimilation and exclusion and ask whether our vision of pluralism is generous enough to include people as they are, not just as we expect them to be.

If the sight of the Mexican flag gives some pause, maybe that pause is doing its job. The truth is, the presence of that flag in this country, in this city and in these protests is not only valid; it matters. It speaks to a history too often ignored, to a community too often overlooked. It reminds us that belonging isn’t granted through silence or submission but claimed through presence, memory and voice.

Perhaps it’s asking us to slow down and consider a deeper question: Are we a country unsettled by complexity or one confident enough to hold it?

NOTES

[1] In Los Angeles, Televisa refers to TelevisaUnivision, the world’s leading Spanish-language media company, which is headquartered in Doral, Florida but has a significant presence in LA. It’s a major player in Spanish-language media, producing and distributing content across various platforms, including broadcast networks, cable channels, streaming services, and audio platforms. TelevisaUnivision is the result of the merger between Televisa’s content assets and Univision Communications. 

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