Recreational cannabis has been legal in California since 2018, but its use remains a stigma around Latinos in the state and the rest of the US.

Dislike of recently arrived immigrants in the US is nothing new. The traditional “Mexican hypothesis” posits that cannabis’s popularity among Mexican laborers spurred prohibition. But that theory has been called into question by recent work of scholars such as Issac Campos and Dale H. Gieringer, which shows that Mexicans weren’t particularly familiar with psychoactive cannabis, nor was its use particularly popular among that community. South of the border, the Mexican government’s prohibition on cannabis in 1920, for example, predates efforts among US states.