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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION THURSDAY, AUGUST 8, 2019 | 5
world
After 22 people were shot to death at a
Walmart in El Paso last weekend, a Flor-
ida retiree found herself imagining how
her grandchildren could be killed. A
daughter of Ecuadorean immigrants
cried alone in her car. A Texas lawyer
bought a gun to defend his family.
For a number of Latinos across the
United States, the attack in El Paso felt
like a turning point, calling into question
everything they thought they knew
about their place in American society.
Whether they are liberal or conserva-
tive, speakers of English or Spanish, re-
cent immigrants or descendants of pio-
neers who put down stakes in the Amer-
ican Southwest 400 years ago, many La-
tinos in interviews this week said they
felt deeply shaken at the idea that radi-
calized white nationalism seemed to
have placed them — at least for one
bloody weekend — in its cross hairs.
“At least for Latinos, in some way, it’s
the death of the American dream,” Dario
Aguirre, 64, a Mexican-American law-
yer in Denver and a registered Republi-
can, said about the impact of the killings
on him and those around him.
Mr. Aguirre moved to San Diego from
Tijuana when he was 5, and was raised
by his grandmother in poor Mexican
neighborhoods. He enlisted in the Air
Force and later became an immigration
lawyer — a classic American success
story.
“Many clients tell me, ‘We’re the new
Jews — we’re just like the Jews,’” Mr.
Aguirre said. “It’s quite a transition
from being invisible to being visible in a
lethal way. It’s something new to my
community. We are used to the basic
darkness of racism, not this.”
There are now about 56.5 million Lati-
nos in the United States, accounting for
18 percent of the population — nearly
one in five people in the country. That’s
up from 14.8 million in 1980, or just 6.
percent of the population, according to
the Pew Research Center. Nearly two-
thirds of Latinos were born in the United
States.
From Miami to Los Angeles, many
said in interviews that evidence of rac-
ism had become much more prevalent
since President Trump was elected
pledging to end what he called “an inva-
sion” across the southern border of peo-
ple he often characterizes as violent
criminals. But the seeds of anti-His-
panic sentiment have been apparent in
the country for years, they said.
Daniel Alvarez, 66, who was born in
Cuba but has lived in the United States
since he was 13, said that talking about
the shooting took him back to when he
was in high school and he tapped a
young woman, another student, on the
shoulder. He had not yet learned that
some people in the United States can be
uncomfortable with being touched un-
expectedly.
“The woman turned around and said,
‘Get your dirty hand off me, you god-
damn spic,’” recalled Mr. Alvarez, now a
senior instructor in religious studies at
Florida International University.
His voice caught and he paused as he
choked back tears. “I was totally para-
lyzed, because I could not fathom what
had just happened,” he said. “I could not
figure out why somebody would refer to
me in such ugly language, and I’m 66
and this happened so long ago, and it
still gets me.”
Here in El Paso, a border city of about
680,000 that is around 80 percent His-
panic, the massacre has felt uniquely
personal. Chris Grant, 50, a witness to
the El Paso attack who was wounded by
the gunman, told The El Paso Times that
he had seen the gunman allowing white
and African-American shoppers out of
the Walmart but was spraying Latinos
with bullets. In an online post, the at-
tacker complained about a “Hispanic in-
vasion of Texas.”
Residents now talk about how it feels
dangerous to go out to eat or to the mov-
ies. Gun shops in the city are bustling
with customers, many of them Latino.
“It’s basically out of the instinct of not
wanting to be a victim,” said Zachary
Zuñiga, 32, a lawyer in El Paso who
signed up for a shooting course and is
planning to buy his first gun.
“I want to be able to protect my family
if people like this are going to come here
thinking they can shoot up places where
my family and friends go,” said Mr.
Zuñiga, who grew up in a home where
his parents never had guns.
G. Cristina Mora, a sociologist at the
University of California, Berkeley, who
specializes in immigration and race poli-
tics, said the attack was likely to have
generated a deep sense of unease for
Hispanic Americans no matter how long
they or their families have lived in the
country.
“This has impact beyond the first gen-
eration, the immigrant generation,” Pro-
fessor Mora said. “It reverberates. It
doesn’t have to be you who crossed the
border. It just has to be you who are not
Anglo.”
Suzanna Bobadilla, 28, learned about
the shooting while she was on vacation
in Connecticut with friends from college.
She tried to avoid reading about the
episode in detail for the first couple of
days because it was too devastating, but
could not avoid the story any longer
when it surfaced on her social media ac-
counts.
Ms. Bobadilla’s father came to the
United States from Mexico as a gradu-
ate student in the 1980s and married her
white American mother. Since open hos-
tility toward Latinos has grown more
common over the past few years, she
said she spent a lot of time avoiding the
news in order to look out for her own
mental health.
She either reads or listens to the presi-
dent’s statements, but avoids watching
him on TV because it is too upsetting,
and even scary, to see crowds of people
chanting behind him when he talks
about immigrants.
“As a child of the ’90s, I was taught
that if we just share and come together
and be collaborative, we’ll have this har-
monious society,” said Ms. Bobadilla,
who has worked for Google in San Fran-
cisco since she graduated from Harvard
University.
But lately, she said, that has begun to
feel like “really hard work that is ex-
hausting.”
In Los Angeles, Kenia Peralta, 18, has
been glued to Twitter and news sources
reading about the shooting. It has
prompted her to question her own iden-
tity as an American.
“If this is what America is supposed to
be, only white, then I guess I am not
American,” said Ms. Peralta, the daugh-
ter of immigrant parents from El Sal-
vador. She and her 15-year-old brother
live with their parents in a one-bedroom
apartment near downtown Los Angeles.
“I will always be seen first as His-
panic, no matter if I was born here,” said
Ms. Peralta, who will enroll at the Uni-
versity of California, Irvine, this fall.
Bertha Rodriguez, a 73-year-old retir-
ee who was born in Cuba and grew up in
the Midwest and in Mexico, where her
father worked as a jockey, said she had a
hard time talking about the El Paso
shooting without breaking into tears.
“I live in this terror for my grandkids,”
said Ms. Rodriguez, who now lives with
her mother in Century Village, a large
retirement community in Pembroke
Pines, Fla. She said two of her grandchil-
dren happened to be at a Walmart in
Louisiana when the El Paso massacre
unfolded.
“This is not the United States that I
grew up in,” she said.
In Connecticut, Karla Cornejo Villavi-
cencio, 30, said she felt physically sick
when she learned that the gunman in El
Paso had seemed to have targeted Lati-
nos. She and her parents came to the
United States from Ecuador without pa-
pers when Ms. Cornejo Villavicencio
was 5.
She is temporarily protected from de-
portation under the Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals program and is ap-
plying for a green card through her
spouse, but her parents are still undocu-
mented.
Now finishing up a Ph.D. at Yale in
American Studies, Ms. Cornejo Villavi-
cencio was out to dinner with her part-
ner when she heard the news about the
attack in El Paso. She briefly cried in the
car but then stopped herself. Crying is
considered a sign of weakness in her
family and she was scolded for doing it
as a child.
To her, the shooting felt like the culmi-
nation of a lifetime of fear, one that used
to be about her parents getting de-
ported, but now included the possibility
that they could be targeted in an attack.
“It’s really hard to be alive as an immi-
grant right now and to not be sick and
exhausted,” she said. “It feels like being
hunted.”
El Paso’s terror leaves Latinos in grip of fear
EL PASO
For many, the attack
has raised questions about
their place in U.S. society
BY SIMON ROMERO,
CAITLIN DICKERSON,
MIRIAM JORDAN
AND PATRICIA MAZZEI
Simon Romero reported from El Paso,
Caitlin Dickerson from New York, Mir-
iam Jordan from Los Angeles and Patri-
cia Mazzei from Miami. Erin Coulehan
and Arturo Rubio contributed reporting
from El Paso.
A vigil in El Paso for the victims of the massacre at a Walmart store. “At least for Latinos, in some way, it’s the death of the American dream,” a Mexican-American lawyer said.
IVAN PIERRE AGUIRRE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Suzanna Bobadilla, the daughter of a Mexican immigrant, said she won’t watch Presi-
dent Trump on TV because it’s too upsetting when he talks about immigrants.
CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Grieving for the victims in El Paso. Many Latinos said they were shaken at the idea that
radicalized white nationalism seemed to have placed them in its cross hairs.
CALLA KESSLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES
“I live in this terror
for my grandkids.
This is not the United
States that I grew up in.”
A 21-year-old man was charged with
murder last week after shooting another
man in the parking lot of a Walmart in
Auburn, Me. At the retailer’s store in
North Bergen, N.J., a woman squirted
pepper spray at people around the
customer service desk in February, tem-
porarily blinding some employees and
customers. She then retreated into a
back room, wielding a knife and shout-
ing obscenities.
And on Monday a customer grabbed a
kitchen knife off a shelf, began unwrap-
ping it and threatened an employee,
prompting an evacuation of a Walmart
in Marietta, Ga. A few weeks ago, a man
was arrested at the same store, accused
of trying to kidnap a 9-year-old from the
bathroom.
Walmart is the world’s largest retailer,
with more than 4,000 sprawling stores
dotted across every region of the United
States. And partly because it operates in
so many places, crime, some of it deadly,
seems to follow it.
The shooting at the Walmart in El
Paso that killed 22 people on Saturday
was the worst episode to happen inside
or in the parking lot of one its stores in
the company’s history. Police and law
enforcement experts have said there
was not much Walmart could have done
within that store to prevent the gunman
from carrying out the massacre. But it
has placed renewed attention on why
the retailer has historically been the
scene of so much crime, and whether the
company has done enough to deter it.
In the week before the El Paso shoot-
ing, at least three people were killed at
Walmart stores across the nation, in-
cluding two employees who, officials
said, were shot by a former colleague at
the store in Southaven, Miss.
“In some ZIP codes, Walmart is a sig-
nificant driver of crime rates,” said Da-
vid C. Pyrooz, an associate professor of
sociology at the University of Colorado
who was the co-author of a 2014 study
analyzing the stores’ impact on local
crime.
There are thousands of reports of
shoplifting each year, straining the re-
sources of local police departments, who
say they spend much of their day pro-
cessing petty theft cases. Police have
complained that Walmart, renowned for
controlling costs, depends too heavily
on the local police and taxpayers to pros-
ecute wrongdoing in its stores, rather
than taking on the responsibility — and
expense — itself.
In some cities in Kentucky, calls relat-
ed to Walmart sites accounted for as
much as 36 percent of all crime reports,
according to one analysis. The police de-
partment in Tulsa, Okla., logged 1,
more calls for service at their Walmart
locations than their next leading re-
tailer, according to a report by Bloom-
berg Businessweek in 2016. The Tampa
Bay Times reported that in some years
local police departments received, on
average, two calls every hour about
problems at Walmart stores in several
Florida counties.
With thousands of stores, covering
much of the United States, the police say
bad things are bound to happen when
people of all walks of life coexist in an
enclosed space.
In many rural areas, Walmart is the
primary place where people come to
shop and socialize, and bump into
friends or enemies. Sometimes these
chance encounters lead to violence, as
was the case with the killing at the Wal-
mart in Maine late last month. The two
men, who were engaged in a running
dispute, encountered each other in the
Walmart parking lot.
“It does suggest that if this is the na-
ture of your clientele, you need to have
security provisions in place,” said Mi-
chael Scott, director of the center for
problem-oriented policing at Arizona
State University.
Walmart says it has taken steps to im-
prove security at its stores, like in-
stalling cameras in parking lots, known
as “lot cops,” and hiring off-duty police
officers on busy days. The Walmart
greeters, who once only welcomed shop-
pers as they entered the store, now have
expanded duties that include checking
receipts and helping with returns — in-
creasing interactions with shoppers
that can act as a deterrent.
“You can never predict violence; no
business can,” a Walmart spokesman,
Randy Hargrove, said. “But what you
can do is prepare for it. We are continu-
ing to invest and change because safety
is a top priority.”
There were no armed security guards
on duty at the time of the massacre in El
Paso. It was a busy shopping weekend,
with the store packed with people stock-
ing up for the new school year.
Because of open-carry gun laws in
Texas, Walmart shoppers at the store in
El Paso and other stores around the
state are allowed to carry firearms
openly.
“It adds to the chaos,’’ said Shannon
Watts, a founder of Moms Demand Ac-
tion. “If someone is openly carrying in
Walmart, how does anyone know who
the bad guy is or who the good guy is?
How do you know if that’s a police officer
or someone who intends to do you
harm?”
Walmart remains the largest gun
seller in the nation, even as the company
has been gradually limiting the types of
firearms that it sells. The company
stopped selling handguns in nearly all
its stores years ago and dropped AR-
rifles from its shelves in 2015.
After the mass school shooting in
Parkland, Fla., in February 2018, Wal-
mart began requiring all gun buyers be
at least 21 years of age, regardless of lo-
cal laws. Last month, Walmart stopped
selling guns in its stores in New Mexico
after the state expanded its law on back-
ground checks.
Walmart now sells guns in about half
of its roughly 4,000 supercenters around
the country. Mr. Hargrove said the
shooting at the Walmart in El Paso has
not prompted any discussions among
the company’s senior management
about further restricting gun sales.
“We have worked very, very hard to
be a responsible gun seller, and we have
tried a number of things to support that
mission,” Mr. Hargrove said. “That is
our focus as we go forward.”
In Marietta, a city outside Atlanta, po-
lice receive at least one call a day from
the city’s two Walmart stores, mostly for
shoplifting. But in the past few weeks,
the store has been the scene of more se-
rious crimes. In June, a 9-year-old boy
said that while he was using the rest-
room a man told him that his mother had
left the store and he should come with
him. When the boy refused, the 51-year-
old man grabbed him by the arm, the po-
lice said. The boy broke free and found
his mother, who called the police.
Then on Monday morning, the police
received a call about a “family dispute”
at the customer service desk that
quickly escalated when a man grabbed a
large kitchen knife from a display. He
“was attempting to remove it from the
packaging while aggressively ap-
proaching one of the Walmart employ-
ees,” according to a police report. The
man was charged with simple assault.
“Certain things tend to happen in par-
ticular places,” Chuck McPhilamy, the
public information officer for the Mari-
etta police, said in an interview. “Wal-
mart is one of them.”
Shooting renews scrutiny of crime at Walmart
David Yaffe-Bellany contributed report-
ing.
The police have complained that Walmart depends too heavily on law enforcement to
prosecute wrongdoing in its stores, rather than taking on the responsibility itself.
CELIA TALBOT TOBIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Many of its U.S. stores
are the source of calls to
local police departments
BY MICHAEL CORKERY
“Walmart is a significant driver
of crime rates.”
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