The ongoing riots in Los Angeles over immigration enforcement have taken on a decidedly nationalist character, with rioters and supporters invoking Mexico’s past ownership of much of the western United States to claim a heritage and tie to the land that predates American ownership.

“This is our city and this was Mexico! You can’t kick us out of the land that was ours,” shouted one rioter in a viral video.

Such assertions have come not just from rioters, but media personalities and senior Mexican leaders, with some threatening intervention in the demonstrations and even organized mobilization on behalf of their “countrymen.”

The United States acquired a large portion of its current territory in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). What began with the annexation of the Republic of Texas became an all-out war that saw the U.S. acquire California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. The war ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo and the U.S. later purchased a small amount of border land to build a railroad in the Gadsden Purchase.

Attracting considerable attention in the media have been high-profile images and footage of rioters prominently displaying Mexican flags, often juxtaposed with burning vehicles of destroyed property.

The riots ostensibly began in response to a series of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids across Los Angeles County, including at Home Depot locations, following suggestions from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. The Home Depot is the world's largest home improvement retailer with approximately 475,000 employees and more than 2,300 stores in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

Illegals are known to loiter in the parking lots of its facilities, hoping to secure under-the-table work from people working on their homes or other projects.

The founding myth of Aztlán

Prior Latino-centered political movements in the United States have invoked Mexican founding myths, including that of Aztlán, the legendary homeland of the Aztecs prior to their arrival in what is now Mexico. The former Mexican territories in the United States have long been speculated to have been Aztlán and that theory has played a prominent role in Spanish-speaking politics for decades.

Political activists in the 60s and 70s, for instance, advocated for Spanish speakers to reclaim what they believed to be their ancestral homeland from English speakers.

In modern contexts, the Aztlan myth has taken on some relevance in the context of the immigration debate, with pundits invoking Mexico’s prior ownership of the territory and some groups even creating a flag to represent the region.

At least one group opposing the ICE raids this month, the far-left Union Del Barrio activist group, mentions Aztlán in its manifesto, calling on the “oppressed people” in “Aztlan/México Ocupado (occupied Mexico), regardless of national origin and citizenship, to join the process of building a revolutionary, reunified, and socialist México; ultimately advancing Simón Bolívar’s dream of a unified continent.”

Members of the group were filmed attempting to interfere in an ICE operation on Sunday and have been active in the local response to ICE raids.

Media, Mexican politicians weigh in

Though the word, “Aztlán” has generally not been mainstreamed in the current iteration of the protests, some of the narratives behind that movement have permeated the media discourse. Speaking on MSNBC this week, for instance, former Univision anchor Maria Elena Salinas highlighted Mexico’s historic ownership of the southwestern United States, especially Los Angeles.

“I was born in LA. That's where my roots are. That's where I started my career,” she said. It is almost 50% Hispanic. Remember that California was part of Mexico. All of the Southwest is Mexico, so the roots are really deep in that region.”

“And what they're saying is, No, not in our community, because when they're coming in, even though there's second, third, fourth, fifth, generation, Latinos that live there, Mexican-Americans that live there,” she added. “Some of them might be their family members, the people that they're going after. It's personal for them.”

Mexican Senate President Gerardo Fernández Noroña on Monday invoked Mexico’s prior ownership of the land to claim that the Latino population in the southwestern United States had a national heritage there.

“I was at Trump Tower when President-elect Donald Trump said, who was sixteen days away from taking office for the first time as president, about to assume the role. And I said, ‘Yes, we'll build the wall and pay for it. But we'll do it according to the 1830 map of Mexico,’” he said on the Senate floor this week. Gerardo held up a map of the 1830 Mexican borders during those remarks, showing Texas and California as part of his country.

“Maybe a third, at least a quarter of the North American territory was part of Mexico until 1846. We were stripped of these territories,” he added. “We were settled there before the nation now known as the United States. The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo establishes rights for the people settled in those territories, which were not respected.”

“With this geography, how can they talk about liberating Los Angeles and California, the United States government? Liberate them from whom? The Mexican men and women who are settled in that place are settled in what has always been their homeland,” he insisted.

Demographic data undercuts that notion

Despite the assertions of Hispanic leaders that their communities have had continuous ties to the once-Mexican land predating the American acquisition, the size of the Latino population is an undeniably recent phenomenon. There have indeed been some Spanish speakers in the former Mexican territories since their acquisition by the U.S. states, but the overwhelming majority of Latinos in those areas are more recent arrivals. 

In 1970, for instance, the non-Hispanic white population of California was nearly 80% while Latinos represented just over 10% of the population. The state was 57% white in 2000 and 26% Latino. In 1850, shortly after its acquisition, the Census Bureau reported California as 99.0% white and 1.0% black, with Hispanics listed as statistically negligible. By 1910, the white population had fallen to 95.0%, with 0.9% black, 0.7% Native American, 3.4% Asian and Pacific Islander, and other groups listed as statistically irrelevant. The Census Bureau first delineated Hispanics in 1940.

The economics prompting foreign input

While the Los Angeles riots have provided an opportunity for Mexican officials to weigh in to some degree, the senior leadership in Mexico City has made clear that it sees planned taxes on remittances in the “big, beautiful bill” as an issue of at least comparable substance to deportations.

“If necessary, we’ll mobilize. We don’t want taxes on remittances from our fellow countrymen. From the U.S. to Mexico,” Sheinbaum said this week. The “big, beautiful bill” in the House-passed form, includes a 3.5% tax on remittances, though some Senate Republicans have suggested the figure is far too low. Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., this week, introduced legislation to up the rate to 15%.

Many immigrant workers send funds back to their home countries, including to Mexico. That country received an estimated $62.53 billion in remittances from the United States in 2024 alone. The nation has a total GDP of $1.85 trillion, meaning remittances account for roughly 3.4% of the Mexican economy.