“USA” Becomes Anti-Latino Chant At HS Basketball Game

Of all the cheers and taunts that you think you could hear at a high school basketball game (“We’ve got spirit, yes we do!” and such), “USA! USA!” wouldn’t be at the top of your list. You wouldn’t be inclined to think that the “USA!” chant was in any way derogatory, or racist for that matter. But if you were at a recent high school basketball game in San Antonio, Texas, you’d be wrong.

This is what happened: the teams — the Alamo Heights Mules and the Thomas Edison Golden Bears – met in a regional tournament match-up. The winner would move on in the competition. The Alamo Heights Mules won, and in their post-victory celebration a group of Alamo Heights students began chanting “USA! USA!”

At first glance the chant was entirely misplaced – both teams are American high school squads, it wasn’t an international competition. But at second glance the chant was abusive. The winning team, high school and school district are predominantly white and affluent. The Golden Bears – starters and bench – are all Latino. Edison High School is predominantly Latino as is the San Antonio Independent School District.

The “USA! USA!” chant was dripping with implied meaning: the Latino team is foreign.

Context, in this case, is everything. What can be a more American venue than a U.S. high school basketball gym? And in that most Norman Rockwell of places a group of Latino boys, athletes, were mocked because of their ethnicity.

It’s not hard to follow the reason for the implied meaning, it’s the same reason that most U.S. Latinos have come to feel strongly about the national immigration issue. The harsh right wing anti-immigrant rhetoric is felt as an affront by all U.S. Latinos when our very culture and ethnicity is seen as less-than American. And yet that rhetoric goes on unchecked and unhampered — valid right wing rallying cries.

Mind you, some in the group of chanting students were themselves Latino. But that speaks more to the class divisions within San Antonio society than it does of anything else. San Antonio likes to brag about its cultural diversity and spirit of getting along. But there’s always a deep rooted apprehension about the “other.” The “USA!” chant was nothing more than a manifestation of that otherness, and it was blatantly wrong.

In the wake of the incident, the pertinent apologies have been made and the chanting Mule partisans have been banned from attending the subsequent regional game. But the damage has been done, the saying has been said. And San Antonio is going to have to live with it.

If you’d like to leave Edison High School and its athletes a word of positive encouragement, you can get the contact information here.