I want to name something that the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez makes impossible to avoid.

This was not only an act of state violence. It was also a clarifying moment about the internal ordering of power within the category “Latino.”

The people who fired the shots and the person who was killed do not share the same racial or ethnic position. Alex Pretti was not Latino. But the shooters, the institutions involved, and the public interpretation of this event are being read through that category—and that reading matters.

What this reveals is not a moral failure of individuals, but a structural reality: “Latino” is not a shared position of safety or power. It is an administrative category that contains a hierarchy—one that sorts people by proximity to the state, legal status, role, skin tone, class position, and alignment with enforcement.

In moments like this, that hierarchy resolves instantly.

This is also why Terrenales matters as a lens. Terrenales names a hemispheric position shaped by historical rupture—by enslavement, Indigenous genocide, displacement, and forced continuity in the Americas. It is not a cultural identity or a claim to virtue. It is a structural location formed through exposure rather than protection. Our complexity—historical, racial, political, and relational—requires the naming of Terrenal reality, because without it we default to flattened categories that cannot hold how power actually operates.

Terrenales also matters because it names the majority condition within the Latino category. Most people labeled Latino are Terrenales—people whose lives have been shaped by rupture, migration, labor extraction, and dispossession—and yet they have little to no representation among those who most publicly “share” the label. They are not represented within the professional and institutional strata that speak on behalf of Latinos, direct Latino-led organizations, or shape public narratives. Nor are they represented within mainstream institutions more broadly. This absence is not incidental; it is structural. It explains how decisions affecting the many are routinely made by and for the most shielded within the category, while those most exposed remain unseen, unheard, and unaccounted for.

Terrenales helps us see what the Latino category otherwise obscures: that some people are repeatedly positioned as expendable in order for others to be absorbed upward into authority. It makes visible how state power recruits from within racialized communities while maintaining an internal picking order over whose lives are shielded and whose lives are interruptible.

There is also a longer historical pattern that must be named. Awareness of the overseer function comes from Black history—from generations of analysis forged under slavery, Jim Crow, and modern policing. The overseer is not an identity or a moral judgment; it is a structural role created by systems of domination: an intermediary recruited from within an exposed population, granted conditional insulation, and tasked with enforcing order downward rather than challenging power upward. Naming this lineage matters, because it reminds us that these dynamics are neither new nor accidental—they are inherited technologies of control.

This reality is often misrepresented across the political spectrum. The Right tends to universalize violence—collapsing the actions of individuals or institutions into claims about entire groups of people, using harm to justify fear, punishment, or exclusion. The Left, by contrast, often moves toward absolution—flattening complexity in order to preserve a moral frame that cannot accommodate internal hierarchy, recruitment, or coercive roles within racialized communities. Neither characterization is accurate. Neither is appropriate. And neither is conducive to the changes required to address the reality we are facing or to build a shared future grounded in responsibility rather than denial.

I want to be explicit about why I am offering this analysis. Much of the public commentary circulating right now reflects genuine outrage, but little understanding of how these dynamics actually operate on the ground. Many people have not lived inside conditions of exposure and expendability, nor witnessed at close range how violence is produced, justified, and normalized within communities and by the state.

In my gang intervention work, I have been directly impacted, targeted, and placed at risk. I have witnessed tremendous violence—violence carried out by gangs, and violence carried out by law enforcement, including officers operating far outside the bounds of accountability. That proximity has taught me how coercive power circulates, how it recruits internally, and how it sorts whose lives are protected and whose lives are treated as interruptible. That experience is not separate from this moment. It is part of how I recognize the pattern when it appears.

In the face of this kind of violence, community is the steadying force. Not as sentiment, but as infrastructure. Community holds coherence when narratives fracture. It carries continuity when institutions escalate harm. It is where meaning is stabilized when fear, outrage, or silence threaten to take over.

Because of that, I want to offer a few grounded suggestions as we move through this moment—especially as familiar patterns begin to reassert themselves:

• Resist pathologizing Latino communities. Do not collapse structural violence into stories about “bad actors,” cultural deficiency, or internal dysfunction. That move obscures power and redirects blame downward.

• Refuse essentialized narratives about ICE or enforcement. Avoid framing the current situation as anomalous, misunderstood, or reducible to a single incident. What we are seeing is patterned, not exceptional.

• Do not mistake representation for accountability. The presence of Latino officers does not mitigate violence; it often stabilizes it. Keep the focus on structures, not optics.

• Avoid silence as a coping strategy. Saying nothing in order to “get through the moment” may feel protective, but it allows incoherence to settle in and normalize harm.

• For the professional Latino class and the change-making sector:
  If you hold institutional access, credentials, or narrative authority, resist the pull to smooth over violence in the name of unity, pragmatism, or career safety. Do not act as a buffer that translates harm into palatable language for institutions. Use your position to clarify power, stay accountable to community rather than upward to systems, and refuse silence as a professional strategy.

• For those on the Left:
  Resist the temptation to wish this violence fit a simpler narrative—one in which harm only moves through white bodies and never through racialized ones. State violence does not require whiteness to operate; it requires authorization, insulation, and legitimacy. Do not downplay, redirect, or exceptionalize this moment to preserve ideological comfort. Let the analysis deepen rather than retreat.

• Stay close to community. Listen, remain relational, and let shared sense-making guide action rather than reaction. Coherence emerges through connection, not commentary.

This is difficult to name because we are often taught to reach for unity language at moments of harm. But unity rhetoric collapses when force is applied. What remains is the need for clarity, relationship, and responsibility.

I’m sharing this not to provoke agreement, but to help us stay oriented. If we cannot name how power sorts us—even within shared categories and complex histories—we cannot respond coherently to the moment we are in.