The Equal Justice Society honors Hispanic Heritage Month, September 15 through October 15, and the contributions and achievements of Latinos, Latinas, Latines, and Hispanic Americans and immigrants in this country. We especially celebrate our staff, board members, and advisory board members who are of Latina/o/e or Hispanic descent.
Latino and Hispanic Americans and immigrants are cherished and vital to our nation yet face systemic and widespread oppression by the authoritarian Trump/MAGA regime.
The tragic reality is highlighted by a recent opinion piece by journalist Julio Túpac Cabello, published on palabra, the digital news site of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Cabello interviews Ernesto Castañeda, sociologist, researcher, professor at American University in Washington, D.C.
We particularly uplift these relevant highlights from the article:
- Human beings understand the world through representation. Material reality alone is not enough. If things do not exist as ideas in our consciousness, if they are not part of the way we think, they symbolically disappear. That is what is happening to Latinos in the United States.
- We are now facing a second Trump administration backed by a political culture that seeks to erase us, one that does not see a multiethnic, multireligious, multilingual society as a virtue. Instead, it aims to restore hegemonic control to the group it believes is the rightful embodiment of the American identity: white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, or conservative Christian.
- “ … within the MAGA project, Latinos cease to be part of the American polis and instead become a group of people who must be expelled from society. Even Latinos who have been settled in the United States for many years now face the explicit threat of being pushed out.”
- “ … another objective of MAGA policies is to dismantle the civil rights achieved during the 1960s through the struggles of Martin Luther King Jr. and many others, which established greater equality for African Americans and other ethnic communities, while also advancing women’s rights.”
- Like every nationalist and supremacist movement, however, this search for an imagined original purity is ultimately absurd. There is simply no way to erase the 65 million Hispanics counted by the U.S. Census, with their mixed marriages and their second- and third-generation Latinos born and raised in this country. Latinos have been transforming American culture for decades, and they will continue to do so for decades to come. Today, they make up 20% of the U.S. population.
- Some people are afraid to leave their homes. As a result, they earn less and spend less, affecting not only their own lives but also the broader economy, including businesses that have nothing to do with Latinos. According to a University of Pennsylvania study, consumer spending declined by $14 billion in 2025 alone because of this phenomenon.
EJS is building an inclusive and multiracial democracy by confronting barriers and historic harms to Black, Indigenous, and marginalized people of all identities. This Hispanic Heritage Month, we renew our commitment to this mission and to the coming day when none of us need to fear the government because of how we look or the language we speak.