LA Riot Afterthoughts: The Case of Representative Roybal and Hispanic non-Assimilation

The vandalism of the Edward C. Roybal Building (a YouTube screenshot, seen here ) during the current LA riots reminded me of something I wrote about the late Congressman Edward C. Roybal and Hispanic assimilation.

The Edward C. Roybal Building in happier times. There are many buildings named for Roybal, but this one is Federal.

I had seen this long-forgotten PC flap in a 1980 Playboy magazine. (1980s magazines are a fertile source of historical trivia, but my original intention was just to look at the pictures):

Representative Charles Bennett was asked what he thought about the charge that a colleague, Representative Edward Roybal, was reprimanded for accepting money from Korean interests only because he was Hispanic. Bennett said he didn’t even know Roybal was Hispanic until the House debate. “It was hard for me to believe that he was a Mexican.” Bennett said. “I thought Mexicans were short with mustaches.”

THE FRITO BANDITO PRIZE, Playboy, March 1980, p. 26

Both Congressmen were Democrats, although Bennett was a conservative Democrat, a species also long-forgotten.

Roybal, born in 1916, was a New Mexican by birth, who moved from there to Los Angeles as a child. Wikipedia says of him that he was born “to a Hispanic family that traced its roots in Albuquerque, New Mexico back hundreds of years, to the Roybals who settled the area before the founding of Santa Fe”.

What that means is that Roybal, pictured above was basically white, i.e.. of Spanish descent, unlike the mestizos and Indians who make up 90 percent of the Mexican population—and an even higher percentage of Mexican illegal aliens in the U.S..

These are people who tend to look like the late Representative Raul Grijalva, who was indeed short and mustached. (Pictured left, next to 6’1” former President Obama.)

It’s clear that Roybal resented Bennett’s remark, because it shows up in an New York Times story four years later:

WASHINGTON— Representative Edward R. Roybal remembers the incident clearly, and painfully. A fellow Congressman approached him several years ago and said to the California Democrat: ”I didn’t know you were a Mexican. I thought all Mexicans were short and fat and wore mustaches.”

Mr. Roybal is a slender man of medium height, and he does not wear a mustache. But he does wear his ethnic heritage with great pride, and he tells the story to illustrate his argument that many lawmakers still know little about Hispanic people, and care little about their feelings.

Lately, however, Mr. Roybal has been forcing Congress to pay a great deal of attention to Hispanic concerns. Almost single-handedly, he has led the fight against a bill that would tighten the nation’s immigration laws, arguing that the measure would cause discrimination against his people. [More]

Roybal Digs In His Heels On Immigration By Steven V. Roberts, June 10, 1984, Emphases added.

“His people”? I thought the Roybals had been in New Mexico since…ah, what he’s saying is he is a Mexican, really, like Judge Curiel (the American-born La Raza judge Trump called a “Mexican judge” ) supposedly wasn’t.

the 1992 Rodney King Riots, the arrestees were 33 percent illegal aliens—something the Bush I Administration did “any special effort” to deport, but 51 percent Hispanic.

See my article here:

So what was going on with Roybal is he, in spite of being American-born, was loyal to his raza—“his people“—over the interests of other Americans, especially those Americans victimized by mass immigration.

That’s what’s going on with the rioters, too.

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