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Donald Trump’s presidential campaign set off waves of attention to ethnic discrimination, both subtly and openly. Trump, on speaking about immigration, vows to get the “bad hombres” out to protect the country from drugs. Repeatedly, during the debate he uses the word, “bad” in referring to Mexicans who attempt to come to America. Finally, using the term “bad hombres”, Trump positions himself as “elevating white authority” (Ahearn 233). The Spanish speaking immigrant is now stereotypically portrayed as a drug dealer whom America must protect its people from. Trump a privileged white male basks in the superiority he has used to mock the Mexican man. He poses white America as the emblem of defense and righteousness, while Spanish-speaking America is portrayed as a menace to society.
His term, “bad hombre” can be viewed as “Mock Spanish, “ a way of racializing Spanish speakers in the United States”( Ahearn 232). In reference to Mock Spanish, Jane Hill states, “Unlike the direct indexicality involved in Mock Spanish, which explicitly indexes the speaker as humorous or cosmopolitan...indirect indexicality implicitly indexes negative stereotype of Mexicans and other Latin Americans as treacherous, lazy, politically corrupt...”(1998:683, Ahearn 233).What is interesting is that Trump’s combination of direct indexicality produces the same negative stereotypic effects of indirect indexicality. He intentionally implied to label Mexican immigrants as criminals or malicious by purposefully adding the Spanish word hombre in his speech for the sake of humor on his part.
This humor works against his favor as much of America is appalled by such an ignorant statement as this. With the creation of memes that pose Trump as foolish and unintelligent, opponents of Trump work together to negate the consequences of “conversational agreement” (Ahearn 235). Conversational agreement works to reinforce negative racist conversation. While Trump’s statement is extremely ignorant and only further indexes his narrow sighted white supremist tendencies, others may use his Mock Spanish to “emboldened [them] to make more blatantly negative and eventually outright racist remarks”(Ahearn 235). Trump’s single incident of ethnic profiling, in the sense that he defined what a typical immigrant apparently embodies, is only one of many examples in which Trump’s language has promoted racial discrimination to thrive. The use of language in white America to mock other cultures further establishes the negative views and stereotypes that divide our society.
See also: http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/10/19/third-presidential-debate-trump-immigration-bad-hombres-sot.cnn