Meet Roan Garcia-Quintana, South Carolina’s Non-Native Tea Party Nativist
Roan Garcia-Quintana of Greenville is, despite his name, a white supremacist. Being a white supremacist, it is not so surprising that he is a Tea Party activist.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Garcia-Quintana is also a rabid nativist. Merriam-Webster defines nativism as “a policy of favoring native inhabitants as opposed to immigrants.”
Where you think this would become a problem for Garcia-Quintana is that he was born in Havana and is a naturalized citizen. So here we have a non-native endorsing a policy which would make him a second-class citizen.
In other words, Garcia-Quintana does not want America to be for others what it has been for him.
Nobody said the Tea Party made any sense. Therefore, the befuddled Garcia-Quintana can say, apparently without a sense of irony, that Latino immigration is an “illegal alien invasion.”
If you want to know Garcia-Quintana’s logic, it runs thusly, reports the SPLC: “Although Cuban by birth, Garcia-Quintana does not consider himself Latino. His ancestors, he says, were Spaniards and this makes him white. He refers to himself as “Havana born, Savannah raised” and as a ‘Confederate Cuban.’”
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