“We tell him we don’t have the same papers he does,” Hugo’s father told me. “We have to explain that there are people like Donald Trump and Arpaio” — referring to Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz. — “who are against it.”

Sheriff Arpaio, who joined Mr. Trump at an Arizona rally in July, is famous for his aggressive pursuit of undocumented immigrants. I like to think of him as our Cucuy (a kidnapping boogeyman also known as El Cuco). The Fox News host Bill O’Reilly is El Cadejo (an angry being with sharp canines), and the conservative pundit Ann Coulter is a Llorona screaming “¡Adiós, América!” — the title of her recent anti-Mexico polemic, which refers to the country as “a third world hellhole.”

But it’s The Donald who is on the airwaves the most these days. His unapologetic xenophobia has helped to push his presidential campaign to the top of the fractured Republican field. Like certain politicians in the Weimar Republic, he’s found a largely defenseless group to pick on — who also happen to be reviled by a bankable minority of the electorate.

Even the young hear The Donald’s taunts in their brains.

“He said that Mexican people are bad people, that they want to sell drugs,” a 9-year-old, Alexandra Rubalcava, told me. “He wants to kick out the Mexican people from America and just leave the American people. I think that’s pretty much rude. Every one should be fair, and we should all be treated the right way.”

Alexandra’s father brought her and her two sisters for an excursion to the Plaza México, a Lynwood mall that celebrates Mexican identity with replicas of Olmec sculptures, a statue of Pancho Villa and the facade of a colonial church. I asked Alexandra what was it about the Mexican people that made her proud.

“They work very hard even though they don’t get paid,” she said.

Mr. Rubalcava, a laborer, asked that I not publish his first name. He said he was afraid of getting in trouble with his employer. His daughter has no such fears. She told me that if she could speak to Mr. Trump, she would say: “You’re being unfair to Mexicans. Because what if you were Mexican and someone else was you? And they’re basically kicking you out of the world. How would you feel?”

In just nine short years, Alexandra will be ready to vote. Something tells me she won’t be voting for the Republican slate. Not many Latino people in Lynwood will.