This article concerns a Jewish American woman who seems to love Trump because of her perceived idea of Trump’s willingness to help Israel. She is also helping immigrants, primarily Venezuelans, who are being targeted for deportation.
Some people would say that I am Mexican, but I am not. I am an American. I have never celebrated a Mexican holiday, unless one would consider Dia de los Muertos as one. When I was young, our parents would take us to the cemetery to where my grandparents are buried. It is in Fronton, Texas.
I don’t even like to see cars with flags from other countries. Still, if, for some reason, I were to make my decision based on how America treated Mexico and publicly promoted Mexico, I feel that the MAGA crowd and some Democrats would consider me a traitor at worst and an ungrateful American at best.
I do listen to Spanish music, including Rancheras, going back to Pedro Infante, Antonio Aguilar, Vicente Fernández, and José Alfredo Jiménez, who wrote the song “El Rey”. I don’t recall ever buying an album by any of them, but they were in all the Mexican movies I went to at the drive-in theater. There is now an HEB where the theater used to be in Corpus Christi, Texas. The interesting part is that my Spanish wasn’t that great, and I didn’t understand much of what they were singing. I prefer to eat tortilla de harina with a tortilla de harina as a spoon, even though tortilla de harina was mainly eaten by Tejanos north of the border, at least in Starr County, Texas.
I love much of the Mexican culture, but it does not make me any less American or make me a Mexican.
The Jewish American with dual loyalties.
Arundale, 46, was taking her daughter to dance class one winter night in 2022 when she walked past a large group of refugees shivering in the cold. She doesn’t speak Spanish and has been distrustful of the news media because of what she felt was often unfair coverage of Israel, so she printed out sheets of paper with her phone number and a message: Who are you? Why are you here? I’d like to help.
… Her parents had fostered children when she was young, and Arundale had a long history of volunteering. She was a well-practiced networker, too, organizing aid shipments to Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. She works as a jeweler and is active on social media for her business. Now she began using it to seek help for immigrants. Donations followed. “I want a packed funeral,” she explained. “My retirement plan is to help enough people that I don’t need to worry.”
For most of her life, Arundale never considered herself overtly political. A practicing Jew, she usually voted for candidates who most strongly supported Israel. In recent years, Arundale drifted further to the right. She didn’t like President Joe Biden’s Israel policies. She believed in two genders and that trans women shouldn’t play girls’ sports. In her progressive neighborhood, bookstores sold titles like “The GayBCs.”
“I love my gay friends, but they are over-sexualizing kids,” she said.