The Quiet Provocation of Flying the Mexican Flag

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Shortly after Trump took office in January I noticed an interesting phenomenon in my North Carolina neighborhood: Mexican flags. Within just a mile of my home, I counted three. The first went up just a few houses down from mine, alongside flags for Guatemala and the U.S. I noticed the flags while driving through the neighborhood with my husband one day in February.

“Eeeeey,” I yelled out, happy to see evidence of other Latinos in the neighborhood. “We’re everywhere!”

Not long after, I noticed another Mexican flag go up outside of an apartment around the corner. This one belonged to a Mexican couple that often spent time in the front yard, grilling and playing with their children. Then, across the street from the couple, there was a third Mexican flag outside of a large home that also flew the American flag.

What made this phenomenon especially interesting is that during his second term, the American flag has become a touchstone for President Donald Trump.

Before taking office again, Trump reportedly fumed over a White House order for flags to remain at half-staff for 30 days after the December 2024 death of former president Jimmy Carter, upset that the flags wouldn’t appear fully erect for his big inauguration. On Truth Social, Trump alleged that Democrats were “giddy” about it. "They think it’s so great, and are so happy about it because, in actuality, they don’t love our Country [sic],” he wrote. “They only think about themselves."

Trump eventually got his way, ensuring that the flags at the Capitol flew at full-staff on Jan. 20.

Then, during his inaugural address, he vowed to bring the nation's flag to “new and beautiful” places. “We will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars," he said, promising to send astronauts to plant the American flag on Mars. Also in January, the Trump administration introduced a new “One Flag Policy,” requiring all U.S. government and embassy buildings in the U.S. and abroad to fly only the American flag. And as part of a White House overhaul that includes plans to potentially pave over the lawn in the Kennedy-era Rose Garden, the former New York City slumlord scoped out locations for two new flagpoles. “They’ve needed flagpoles for 200 years,” Trump told reporters in April. (Never mind that an American flag flies atop the White House.)

Long before Donald Trump descended his golden escalator to drag us all to hell, professors Markus Kemmelmeier and David G. Winter wrote that in the United States, the act of displaying the flag is “readily recognized as a statement affirming one’s allegiance to America and the American people.”

While it seems that Americans’ views of the flag are shifting to account for our country’s complex history, the sheer preponderance of American flags in the U.S.—outside of homes and fast food restaurants, atop car dealerships, bars, and prisons—is uniquely American. For the most part, in other parts of the world flags are only flown on government properties.

As a kid, my Mexican immigrant dad always flew an American flag on the Fourth of July, a holiday that makes him uncharacteristically emotional. It’s a tradition I’m now deeply confused by after recently learning he had ample “opportunity” to migrate to the U.S. earlier and he repeatedly turned it down, in part because he knew it would mean spending years without papers, which to him sounded like nothing more than an opportunity to struggle—and indeed it was.

During my nightly phone calls with my dad, who lives more than 2,400 miles away in Southeast Los Angeles, the Trump administration is a regular topic of conversation. When talking about Trump, my dad curses uncontrollably; I can almost hear his blood pressure rising over the phone. To sidestep another furious rant, one evening I told him about the Mexican flags sprouting up in my neighborhood. “What do you think it means?” I asked.

My dad visits me in North Carolina regularly and is even considering a move here, though he is particularly concerned about Southern animus toward Latino immigrants, as if he didn’t just have a racist encounter at a Los Angeles area post office while trying to renew his passport. He’s been a U.S. citizen far longer than he was an undocumented immigrant, but I guess the injustice never leaves you. In fairness, he’s had a mixed bag of experiences in North Carolina. During one visit, my neighbor brought him a pitcher of sweet tea as he worked in our yard one brutally hot summer day. On another visit, a security guard suspiciously followed him around a museum.

“Maybe they’re just proud of where they come from,” my dad said. “Or maybe they’re sick of Trump’s shit.”

My dad encouraged me to fly the Mexican flag in front of my home in North Carolina, but he also instructed me to put up an American flag as well so that no one would set fire to my house.

He was only halfway joking.

The internet tells me that flags are now mostly used for signalizing, decoration, or display, but originally they were mainly used in warfare—to rally the troops, for example, or to help identify friend or foe. Maybe it isn’t so different today.

Even before I saw Mexican flags go up in my neighborhood, I noticed that flags seemed to do a lot of talking for my neighbors. In 2020, there were Black Lives Matter flags. After Russia invaded Ukraine, there were Ukrainian flags. After Oct. 7, 2023, quite a few Israeli flags went up and I saw a total of two Palestinian flags. In June, there are always “Progress Pride Flags,” trans flags, and more than one rainbow flag from the Bitter Southerner that says “Abide no hatred.”

Leading up to and following the 2020 presidential election, I watched the progression of a Trump-loving neighbor’s flags: first the Gadsen flag, followed by a “Trump 2020 flag. When Biden was elected, he switched over to an upside down American flag, signaling his distress, I suppose. During the last election, it was a Trump 2024 flag. When his man was back in the White House, my neighbor once again hung the American flag, this time right-side up.

As the secretary for the North American Vexillological Association (NAVA), an organization devoted to the study of flags, Ted Kaye didn’t seem particularly surprised by the Mexican flags sprouting up in my neighborhood. Not only do flags signal belonging to a group; they also signal belief in a cause, Kaye explained over email.

“Flags are the ultimate icon of our tribalism,” Kaye said, noting that we use flags to show membership in a group, which can be as wide-ranging as a country, state, city, neighborhood, school, religion, military affiliation, favorite sports team, ethnic group, or sexual orientation. We also use flags to advance causes such as nationalism and political and cultural initiatives.

If American flags symbolize patriotism at best and nationalism at worst, what the hell did these Mexican flags in my neighborhood represent?

“[Flags] advance solidarity among those who share the affiliation or belief, and opposition from those who don't,” Kaye told me. “Flying Mexican flags can be a way to show identification by, or solidarity with, Mexican immigrants to the U.S. In these times, that may well represent a challenge to the policies of the current administration.”

I’ve never been patriotic. In fact, I was the asshole high schooler who refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, rolling my eyes at “one nation, under God” and mumbling about the separation of church and state. Aware of our nation’s founding and history, I would never fly an American flag and especially not with Trump in office. But I found myself strongly drawn to the idea of flying a Mexican flag. In my overwhelmingly white suburban neighborhood where my kind neighbors are used to Mexicans quietly working behind the scenes as their restaurant cooks, gardeners, construction crews, and cleaners, I wanted to assert that I am here. I eventually ordered a small Mexican flag actually made in Mexico, a country I have not been to since I was a child.

Just hours after I hung my Mexican flag, I got a text from my neighbor, the same one who gave my dad sweet tea on a hot summer day.

“I’m in love with your new flag!”

“Thank you,” I wrote back. “My dad encouraged me to get it.”

“I’m proud that you are proud. Tell your dad I might get the Italian flag and put it in front of my house so we can almost look like sisters,” she texted, along with an image of Italy and Mexico’s flags side-by-side.

It was a kind and unexpected exchange, leading me to wonder if my neighbors flying Mexican flags got any feedback of their own. But mostly I found myself curious as to why my neighbors decided to fly Mexican flags. If American flags symbolize patriotism at best and nationalism at worst, what the hell did these Mexican flags in my neighborhood represent?

Paying Homage

“This is fucking insane, you know that?”

My husband, bless his heart, worries a lot about what the neighbors will think. It’s what keeps him obsessively mowing the yard for fear of silent judgement, and it’s what leads him to shoot me a look if I curse too loudly while we talk in the driveway. So when I asked him to slowly drive me around our neighborhood so that I could jot down the addresses of our Mexican flag-flying neighbors, he thought it was “fucking insane.” Of course he did it anyway.

Never one of those reporters who could comfortably knock on a stranger’s door for an on-the-spot interview, I decided to write my neighbors letters in both English and Spanish, explaining that as an immigration reporter and the daughter of a Mexican immigrant, I appreciated their flags and I wanted to know more about their decision to fly them. I requested an interview and instead of using my post office box and Google Voice number, I signed the letters with my real name, home address, and phone number, worried that some might fear this was a bizarre new tactic from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Within a week, I received two responses.

The first was a call from Brian who lives a few houses down from me. He expressed his willingness to be interviewed with his partner Eva; the young couple are both using pseudonyms to protect their identities and the location of our neighborhood.

Since I initially noticed their flags representing Mexico, Guatemala, and the United States, they’d hung a second row of flags featuring the Gadsen flag, the North Carolina flag, and a flag representing the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. At night, a spotlight shines on the side of their house, illuminating the diverse array.

On the phone, my neighbor explained that he and Eva live in a bicultural, blended, and multigenerational home and that my letter was a pleasant surprise. We agreed on a date and time for our interview. The evening of, I shyly walked down the street with a box of pan dulce to meet my neighbors for the first time.

Eva greeted me warmly in Spanish and as we settled into the front yard patio that Brian built. Almost immediately we began to talk about our flags, and I confessed that I felt nervous about my decision to fly the Mexican flag, given an experience I had shortly after Trump’s first inauguration when two white women yelled at me to go back to my own country.

“I didn’t feel nervous about it; what I did feel a little nervous about was the harassment that happened from some neighbors around the corner,” said Eva, explaining that a neighbor with an Israeli flag outside her home and a Trump bumper sticker on her car drove by their house a couple of times, yelling things at her daughter and her group of Latino friends. “I don’t know if the reason behind the harassment was race. I hate to say it, but nothing else makes sense.”

Eva and Brian take pride in their outspokenness, and say they adhere to a “live and let live” approach to life. While they largely sidestepped politics during our interview, they did emphasize—repeatedly—that they don’t judge or disrespect others for their views, as long as respect is reciprocated.

What did come up rather frequently in our conversation was the subject of race and ethnicity. Eva was born in the Northeast, her father white and her mother a Guatemalan immigrant who fled the country’s civil war for the United States, where she was one of millions of immigrants granted asylum by the Reagan administration. Eva has repeatedly experienced racialized harassment during her time in North Carolina, sometimes from other Latinos crudely questioning her decision to be with a white man. Other times, from white people demanding that she too “go back to her own country”.

“It’s important to be proud and not be scared of what other people might say or what your neighbors might think,” Brian said. “This is our way to pay homage to who we are.”

In the face of this hate, Eva strives to instill in her daughter a sense of pride. The teenager is half Guatemalan, half Mexican, and born in North Carolina. This explains three of the flags that hang outside the couple’s home. However, the idea to hang the flags originally came from Brian, a skilled tradesman who was inspired by the flags he saw hanging from balconies in New Orleans’ French Quarter while in town helping with recovery efforts after Hurricane Ida.

Brian told me that it grates on him when people make assumptions about him based on his race, or when acquaintances seem surprised to learn that he has a Latina girlfriend or that he grew up in a mixed-race family. In the end, he said, other people’s perception of him and Eva have nothing to do with them and the flags are his small effort to ensure his family is represented in the neighborhood.

“It’s important to be proud and not be scared of what other people might say or what your neighbors might think,” Brian said. “This is our way to pay homage to who we are.”

Another neighbor who responded to my letter was also paying homage. This time, to the broader Mexican community.

Jeffrey, a pseudonym, is an elderly, white widower who spent much of his adult life working in the predominantly Latino construction industry in San Francisco’s Mission District, Chicago, and North Carolina, all regions that also have very large populations of Latinos. When the Trump administration’s mass deportations began, Jeffrey watched the Mexican couple across the street play with their children beneath a Mexican flag they hung in their yard shortly after Trump took office for his second term. The 79-year-old felt inspired, and he also told me that he couldn’t understand the vitriol that people across the U.S. have for his immigrant neighbors.

“It just really bothers the hell out of me,” Jeffrey said. “And it bothered me to the point where I kept thinking: What can I do? The one thing that struck me was to fly the flag of Mexico in front of my house… It was out of solidarity.”

According to Jeffrey, the only feedback he’s received thus far are my letter and a quick exchange he had with a neighbor, who teaches Spanish at a local university.

“She came over and she said, ‘I really like that you’re flying that flag,’” Jeffrey recalled. “I think we all want the same things for our families and our neighbors and our friends, just to live together in harmony. Why do we want to hate each other? I don't get it.”

When sharing his final thoughts on his decision to fly the Mexican flag, Jeffrey was less diplomatic: “Flying this flag is my way of saying to Donald Trump and the MAGA people: Up yours."

Protestors, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants, waved Mexican flags, a decision that led to horrendous criticism and accusations of disloyalty to the United States, a country that demands respect even when it shows you none.

For Latinos, flying the Mexican flag in the U.S. isn’t always well received. When exchanging emails with NAVA’s secretary, he reminded me of the mass, nationwide protests against proposed unjust immigration laws in 2006 that, where I lived in Los Angeles, culminated in a May Day march that drew hundreds of thousands—myself included. Protestors, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants, waved Mexican flags, a decision that led to horrendous criticism and accusations of disloyalty to the United States, a country that demands respect even when it shows you none.

I’ve since been thinking a lot about those 2006 protests. Today, I cannot imagine mass mobilization in defense of immigrants, though we saw nationwide protests under the first Trump administration in response to the family separation policy. Now, the administration commits what seems like weekly, unprecedented atrocities against immigrant communities to relative silence. Our empathy ebbs and flows, even in the face of catastrophic conditions.

It wasn’t until I spoke to my neighbors that I really ruminated on my decision to fly a flag for the first time in my life. Like other journalists, I’m drowning in the daily barrage of the Trump administration’s broken laws, human rights violations, and vicious attacks on marginalized communities. Over the years, I’ve become very good at compartmentalizing what I read and report on. I sob at my desk for a minute or two, and then get back to work because my work is the only thing that makes me feel useful in times like these.

I did not know the depth of my personal rage until a few weeks ago, when I found myself crying on my therapist’s couch, expressing a deep grief I didn’t realize I was carrying.

“I feel robbed,” I told my therapist, wiping away tears.

This was going to be a big year for my dad and me. I finally told him I’m working on a book about our family, and I planned to take him back to his birthplace in Angangueo, Michoacán for his 75th birthday. It would be the first time in decades my dad visited where he was born, and our first time in Mexico together since I was a child. I bought a map of the region and stayed awake at night, envisioning us at the Monarch butterfly preserve. I imagined getting to know my dad in new and powerful ways.

But now my dad is afraid to leave the country, and afraid of any harassment I might receive as a movement journalist openly disdainful of the Trump administration. There is no way to know if he’s being overly cautious, but he’s told me firmly now is not the time for our trip together. The recent wave of news stories about Latino U.S. citizens getting picked up by ICE or held at airports by Customs and Border Protection tells me he’s probably right.

My dad will be almost 80 by the time Trump is supposed to leave office. We don’t know what the future holds, so who can say if he will be well enough to travel or if I will even have the funds to make such a trip possible again?

I’ve come to see my Mexican flag not as an act of defiance but as a quiet provocation. I want the dozens of people who walk by my house each day to wonder what it means or to feel challenged by something un-American or to grapple with the perceived disloyalty. Mostly, I want to make sure that they don’t look away.

This piece was edited by Katelyn Burns and copy edited by Chrissy Stroop.