Latinos have a historical obligation to combat empire. Today this means resisting Zionism.

On August 19^th, U.S. House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took the stage at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in my native Chicago. A crowd swelling with liberal fanaticism chanted “AOC” as Ocasio-Cortez strutted to a podium to proclaim that Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza.” 

The audience erupted with applause and Ocasio-Cortez nodded along. Their reactions were seemingly a collective attempt to transmute fiction into fact considering the ridiculousness of Ocasio-Cortez’s assertion. After all, not even a week before the DNC the Biden-Harris administration approved $20 billion in weapons and aircraft sales to Israel so it could continue its ceaseless assault on Gaza. It would be a mistake to take Ocasio-Cortez’s willfully ignorant and spectacle gaslighting claim as an aberration in her politics. 

In November 2023, Ocasio-Cortez voted to enshrine the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism and doubled down on this malignant fusion when she smeared pro-Palestine protesters in New York this summer. In April, when the death toll in Gaza surpassed 30,000 and mass graves were discovered in the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis and on school grounds in Beit Lahiya, she took selfies with Joe Biden and co-signed a statement re-affirming Israel’s “right to self-defense” and advocating for “strengthening the Iron Dome.” 

Ocasio-Cortez’s DNC speech not only represents her assimilation from a progressive challenge to an outright mascot of the neoliberal Democratic establishment but also reflects her coherent support for Zionist settler colonialism and genocide of Palestinians. That AOC made Chicago the pulpit for her genocide-laundering is particularly egregious considering greater Chicago is home to the largest Palestinian American population in the U.S. 

To compound this demographic insult and irony, the Puerto Rican Ocasio-Cortez stumped for Democrat-approved genocide in a city that is also one-third Latino, a population that has been unequivocally supportive of Palestine. For example: Puerto Rican Alderwoman Rossana Rodriguez spearheaded the movement to make Chicago the largest city in the nation to pass a Ceasefire Resolution; the historic Mexican American community of Pilsen is home to the first mural in the city uplifting a Free Palestine; and thousands of Latinos have joined mass marches flooding downtown Chicago since October. 

Demonstrable support for Palestine by Latinos is not unique to Chicago and has been chronicled in other areas like California. Polling reveals Latinos are the group most likely to oppose sending military aid to Israel. Our support for Palestinian liberation is echoed in our countries of origin across Latin America, which have displayed widespread support for Palestine as evidenced by Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s cutting ties with Israel or Mexican protesters setting the Israeli embassy ablaze.  

Ocasio-Cortez’s defense of the Zionist project has led to her disavowal by the progressive and socialist movement that propelled her into the office. Because of her Latina identity, Ocasio-Cortez’s Congressional career has been celebrated as racial and gendered progress. But how is this anything but superficial representational “progress” when prominent Latinos like Ocasio-Cortez fail to represent the pro-Palestine standpoint held by the majority of U.S. Latinos?

Over the last decade, racialized social conflict in the U.S. has proliferated “representation matters” discourse. Latinos have seized the rhetoric of the cultural-political moment to litigate for inclusion within the U.S. This has been particularly evident in entertainment where the success of individual Latino celebrities is championed as progress for the many. In the current moment, such “progress” appears hollow given Latino celebrities’ complicit silence or enthusiastic support for Zionist occupation and genocide. 

The criminally corny Lin-Manuel Miranda’s success is indebted to his Broadway-hit Hamilton that exalted racist, settler colonialist Founding Fathers. Miranda’s support for colonialism extended beyond the stage when he vigorously advocated for the neocolonial PROMESA legislation that placed economic control of Puerto Rico under a corrupt federal oversight board. Miranda literally did a song and dance for Empire when he freestyled for President Barack Obama at the White House in 2016, despite Obama having earned the nickname “Deporter-in-Chief” by then and dropping over 26,000 bombs in Arab and Muslim countries that same year.

In March, the New York Times reported Miranda was continuing to lend a Brownface to a murderous liberal Democratic regime and was spearheading a “Broadway fund-raiser” with Hillary Clinton for President Biden’s re-election. Apparently, Miranda was unfazed by Genocide Joe’s facilitation of 160 days of genocide at that point. 

Actor and producer Eva Longoria immersed herself in politics in recent years, ardently campaigning for Clinton and Biden during their bids for Oval Office. In June, Longoria was called out by Huda Beauty’s Huda Kattan for sharing Zionist propaganda on her social media that was later debunked. Subsequently, when Kattan asked if Longoria planned to post in support of Palestine, Longoria replied, “social media wasn’t really the place.” Longoria’s sudden aversion to politics was likely less about social media propriety and more about her direct collaborations with Zionism, like “teaming up” with the Ruderman Foundation. 

The Ruderman Foundation is committed to disability rights and the “realization of the Zionist dream.” Longoria was honored by the foundation for her disability activism in December 2023 when 9,000 children in Gaza had already lost a limb — illuminating Longoria’s lack of regard for disabled people when they’re Palestinian.  

The Puerto Rican Miranda and Mexican-American Longoria support for Israel’s settler colonialism, gross slaughter of Palestinians, U.S. imperialism, and genocide-enabling Democratic leaders betrays respective Latino histories of support for the Palestinian struggle. 

In 2013, Longoria graduated with a master’s degree in Chicano Studies. Her education apparently skipped Chicanos’ documented identification with Palestine’s anti-colonial battle. In fact, Chicanos, who asserted themselves as an internal colony of the U.S. living under the occupation of their ancestral homeland of Aztlán, sent a delegation to Lebanon in 1980. Members of La Raza Unida met with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. While there, the delegates were shot at, wounded, and nearly killed by the IOF. 

Like Chicanos and unlike Miranda, Puerto Rican activists have long expressed solidarity with Palestinian resistance. In 1978, Puerto Rican activists were among the students who disrupted the 30th-anniversary celebration of “Israeli Independence” held at University of Illinois in Chicago. During the 1980s, Puerto Rican independistas in Chicago like former political prisoner Oscar López Rivera evoked Palestine in their writings and speeches. In May 2017, when López Rivera was released from federal custody after 36 years, he was welcomed by Palestinian political prisoner Rasmea Odeh at the mass rally in Chicago organized for his return.

Miranda and Longoria’s support for the Zionist project may be egregious but perhaps unsurprising given their track record of desperately trying to cozy up to a neoliberal Democratic establishment. Just as jarring as Latinos backing genocide is the sudden silence of Latino celebrities who have never shied away from political causes or for whom Israel’s aggression would appear to hit close to home. 

Puerto Rican global superstar Bad Bunny took advantage of his 2018 television debut on The Tonight Show to call out Trump’s response to Hurricane Maria and has since used his music to confront transphobia and Puerto Rico’s blackouts and colonial history. However, his silence on Zionist settler colonialism and the slaughter of Palestinians exposes the limits of Bad Bunny’s commitment to anti-colonialism and speaking truth to power. 

Peso Pluma and Shakira are two Latino celebrities who share Lebanese descent — and a silence about genocide that is particularly deafening as Israel’s bloodlust and bombardment now includes Lebanon. Shakira’s muteness over U.S. and Zionist mass murder of Arab people is incongruent with her 2020 Super Bowl half-time show that paid homage to “kids in cages” and defied a climate of anti-Muslim racism by performing a zaghrouta, a celebratory Arab ululation. 

What besides self-interest would make such figures who have asserted themselves as valiant Latino voices of the people suddenly silent about the first-ever live-streamed genocide? Their sudden apolitical posturing renders past outspokenness as performative exploitation of trending discourse and social unrest for clout and exposes them less as representatives of the people and more so as tokens of Empire. 

Beyond the cringey supporters of genocide and the cowards quiet in the face of it, there are those Latinos who stand on the right side of history. Singers like Kali Uchis and Omar Apollo have advocated for a Free Palestine, and actor Melissa Barrera has remained steadfast in protesting Israel’s genocide even after an attempt to discipline her into submission by removing her from the Scream franchise. 

Viral indie Puerto Rican journalist Bianca Graulau has consistently expressed solidarity with Palestinians while Arizona Mexican-American journalist Samuel Mena made headlines when he set his left arm on fire to protest media complicity with genocide and as a sacrifice “to the 10,000 children in Gaza who have lost a limb.” 

The imperative of Latino figures to speak out against the Zionist settler colonial project and its never-ending atrocities not only aligns with the U.S. Latino and Latin American people who they claim to represent but also confronts the intertwined struggles of Palestinians and Latinos. 

For example, for at least two decades the U.S. and Israel have collaborated to treat the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a laboratory for militarism and surveillance. The U.S. has awarded billions to Israeli firms to develop drones, motion sensors, security systems, surveillance towers, and training programs to be deployed against Latino immigrants and Palestinians alike. In October 2017, when President Donald Trump revealed border wall prototypes in San Diego, California, the only foreign contractor featured was ELTA, a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries. 

The Zionist entity has never been content to terrorize only Palestinians and across decades has funded and equipped dictatorships, right-wing governments, and paramilitary organizations to repress freedom struggles in Latin American countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Paraguay that enabled the murder and disappearance of hundreds of thousands of people across Latin America. In Guatemala, right-wing leaders called explicitly for the “Palestinianization” of the indigenous Maya population. 

Police departments in cities across the country are trained by the Zionist entity’s “most moral army” that terrorizes Palestinians. Perhaps this explains the lethal response by Atlanta’s police response to Stop Cop City and Forest Defender activist that resulted in the police murder of Venezuelan activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known amongst friends as “Tortuguita.” 

A transnational, transhistorical web of oppression brings into proximity the oppression of Palestinians and Latinos. It underpins the often-repressed history of Latino solidarity with the Palestinian struggle that goes deeper than the current eruption of protests in support of a free Palestine from Boyle Heights to Bolivia. Legacies of European colonialism and U.S. imperialism that shaped Latin America and U.S. Latino population management also provide historical and experiential bases that for decades have spurred many Latinos to connect and sympathize with the Palestinian fight against Zionist settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing. 

History will also tell us we have seldom been able to rely on those of us in proximity to power to be in authentic solidarity with those of us marginalized from it. This is a clarifying moment that distinguishes those of us take “Latino” as an identity to litigate for a better position within U.S. Empire and its neoliberal multicultural society between those who understand “Latino” as an identity intimate with the legacies and realities of colonialism and imperialism and as a collective springboard to challenge them. Our ancestors did not survive genocide so we could sit back and idly witness one. 

For us Latinos, in the belly of the beast, it is important to remember our historical obligation, our collective power and demand an end to U.S. imperialism, to fight for the abolition of Zionism and its depraved entity, and to continue to scream, “Viva, Viva Palestina!”