Threats Aimed at Latino Students at Boulder High School

This can’t be good.

A relatively small item in the Denverpost.com seems ominous to me.

There are threats of violence against Latino High School students, and the police are taking the threats seriously.

Apparently someone tagged the threat on a wall in a bathroom at the school, saying they’d bring a gun.

Given the reports of violence against Latinos across the country, I wouldn’t blame the Latino community in Boulder if they were afraid.

You can read the post HERE.

It doesn’t surprise me, though, given that violence against Latinos has been on the rise since the beginning of this decade. Some national groups that follow such things find a correlation between the increase in violence against Latinos with the intensification of the immigration reform debate.  A 2008 post in the Ventura County Star, written by Justin Akers Chacon, a professor of U.S. history and Chicano studies in San Diego, went into detail:

“According to a recent study published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, hate crimes are on the rise, with attacks on Latinos increasing in tandem with the intensification of the immigration debate. Since 2000, the number of hate groups has swelled by 48 percent, and attacks on Latinos have spiked by 35 percent between 2003 and 2006. While anti-immigrant candidates are repeatedly thrashed in national elections, this has not stopped their like-minded progeny in the street from taking matters into their own hands, confident that their actions are legitimized by what’s happening around them.
This can be attributed to the fact that the anti-immigrant movement has crafted in the public mind the archetype of the undocumented immigrant as Latino, criminal, and a threat to the ‘American way of life.'”

It makes sense, then, to pay attention to threats scrawled on a High School bathroom. It would be irresponsible not to.