Costume on Amazon ‘Racist, anti-Latino’

A costume bearing the inscription “Mexico will pay!” has been described as racist by the man who helped develop the “Make Mexico America Again!” baseball hats.

And Jerónimo Saldaña wants Amazon to stop selling it.

The black and white jumpsuit designed to look like a brick wall has been sold on Amazon since last July, and according to some comments on the Amazon website was a popular Halloween outfit.

But Saldaña sees white supremacy behind the costume, which he calls anti-Latino.

“I had seen the racist costume during the presidential campaign during news coverage of Trump rallies and always found it offensive,” he told The Huffington Post. “Since Trump’s election, I have read articles reporting instances of high school students chanting ‘build that wall’ and ‘Trump’ at students of color and immediately connected those incidents with the normalization of white supremacy, which I believe this costume represents.”

Saldaña’s petition, posted online, is titled “Amazon, drop the hate — ban your anti-Latinx costumes.” (Latinx is a term used to describe people of Latin descent without specifying their gender, replacing Latino and Latina.)

It accuses Amazon of helping to “further white supremacy.”

Saldaña told the Post the petition is a simple act of resistance “meant to push back against the normalization of hate.”

Some commenters at Amazon saw the jumpsuit as racist; others disagreed. One saw it as good for people with a sense of humor. “For those that don’t like it, stop taking yourselves so seriously,” wrote another.

Saldaña has promoted the “Make America Mexico Again” ball cap designed by New York artist Anna Gold. Its satirical messsage suggests the international boundary be redrawn to give back to Mexico much of what is now the U.S.