On October 9, 2022, a series of leaked audio recordings of a conversation that took place on October 18, 2021, between three Democratic Los Angeles City Council members and the president of the L.A. County Federation of Labor drew national attention because of the vulgar and openly racist nature of the conversation. With a redrawing of council district lines looming, on that day then-City Council President Nury Martinez and Councilmembers Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León met with then-President of the Federation, Ron Herrera, to discuss strategy for consolidating Latina/o political power in the city. As the leaked recordings reveal, over the course of the conversation participants made anti-Semitic, homophobic, and racist remarks, the most frequently reported of which targeted African American and Mexican Indigenous communities.

Martinez, whose comments in the recording were perhaps the most egregious, initially resigned the presidency of the City Council on October 10, and, after continued pressure, resigned her City Council seat on October 12. Herrera likewise resigned as president of the Federation of Labor on October 10. Neither Cedillo nor de León resigned their council seats despite immense pressure—Cedillo, who lost his bid for reelection in 2022, completed his term in December of 2022, while de León remains a member of City Council. Beyond exposing the fault lines in Los Angeles city politics, though, the recordings also exposed the ugliness of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity in Latina/o communities more broadly. This article thus seeks to explain and confront Latina/o anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity.

While these recordings inevitably sparked outrage, there are several aspects of the public discourse that followed that are worth considering more closely. First is the question of whether Latina/os are even capable of racism. Shortly after the recordings were released, a senior scholar on a Latina/o-focused listserv argued that Latina/os, as historical victims of racism, cannot themselves be racist. This argument rests upon at least two presumptions: 1) that Latina/os are monolithic; and 2) that Latina/os have not and will not achieve a requisite measure of power for prejudices to rise to the level of racism. The first presumption is easily dismissed: Latina/os in the United States are shaped by highly specific regional and national histories, complicated by local class structures and racial stratifications, that shape how they interact with their neighbors. Any attempt to regard these populations as monolithic is thus doomed to fail. The second presumption reveals an attempt on the part of the poster, whether intentionally or not, to disregard some Latina/os’ comparative proximity to whiteness, and the weaponization of such against African Americans and darker-skinned Latina/os.

Anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity in the U.S. are related at least in part to the racial stratifications of Latin American countries, in which those of “pure” European ancestry typically occupy the highest levels of each country’s racial hierarchy. These hierarchies vary in specifics, but typically those marked as Black or Indigenous occupy the lowest strata. In the U.S., these hierarchies resonate with a system of racial stratification that prizes whiteness first of all and rewards those best able to assimilate to whiteness. Historically, this has included the Irish, Italians, and other Europeans who were initially excluded from, but eventually assimilated into whiteness—though “assimilated” here obscures the extent to which this meant, in effect, adopting dominant views on race and racial exclusion. Latina/os, on the other hand, have historically been marked as racially “other” and have therefore been excluded from the category of whiteness, regardless that Mexicans in particular have been legally defined as white since the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Despite this, many Latina/os are wooed by the promises of whiteness and willing to embrace anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity as the price of admission.

The desire to reap the benefits of whiteness is captured in the recorded conversation between Herrera and the Los Angeles City Council members, even if the participants are critical of white liberals, just as they are of other groups. The participants in the conversation, in their parsing of Los Angeles into pieces defined by the racial or ethnic identity of their residents, embrace a zero-sum mentality in which a victory for one racial or ethnic group is necessarily a loss for other groups. According to this mindset, Latina/os, particularly those represented by the members of the city council on the call, are in direct competition with other groups for a finite pool of resources. This is evident in comments like Herrera’s, when he says, “My goal in life is to get the three of you elected, and you know, I’m just focused on that. I mean, we’re like the little Latino caucus of, you know, our own,” and even more pointedly in Martinez’s comment about Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, “F- that guy. I’m telling you now, he’s with the Blacks.” It is also evident, contradictorily, in Martinez’s comment that, “It’s the white members on this council that will motherf- you in a heartbeat,” as some Latina/os both aspire to the spoils of whiteness and simultaneously view white people as competition along the way.

The anti-Black and anti-Indigenous views of those caught on these recordings emerge from this sense of competition, but, importantly, such views are not limited only to the participants in this conversation. They are unfortunately common among Latina/os, particularly those who are less racially marked by phenotypically Indigenous or Black features, and who do not otherwise carry markers of immigration or class status. And while Martinez and Herrera resigned their positions in the wake of the leaked recordings, confronting anti-Blackness and antiIndigeneity is a much larger task than insisting on resignations whenever a news story emerges. This task requires recognition that Latina/os and African Americans exist within a system that seeks to sow division in order to sustain itself. To overcome this requires Latina/os to recognize and confront our own prejudices and to collectively work with African Americans, other people of color, and white allies to reject attempts at division.