Reply #132: I don't know about kestrel, but I would have

[Igel]

roughly the same problem with the Eire flag being flown above the American flag. To fly a flag above another is to assert sovereignty or supremacy. My genes may have stayed in Ireland for many generation before crossing the Atlantic, but that does not mean that I have to assert Irish sovereignty over any part of the US. I am not one that feels that my genes compel me to know a language or participate in a particular cultural tradition.

To fly the Mexican flag is, IMHO, at least two-fold offensive. First off, the Mexican government is not sovereign over Arizona, not over Apache Junction, not even over Coolidge or Florence. Second, the Irish example isn't all that inappropriate: the student who raised the flag, no doubt, had ethnicity in common with those who had previously raised the flag over the territory when it was Mexican; but, like me, his ancestors have as much claim to being indigenous to Arizona as mine do to being indigenous to Texas. Some sharing his ethnic heritage may claim to be indigenous to the area, but that's rather like my claiming my Irish blood is indigenous to Spain (because some Iberian Ligurians may have travelled and intermarried at some point with Irish Celts) or to Switzerland (because my 'blood' is indigenous to Europe and both Ireland and Switzerland are both, well, in Europe). I could mount a better democracy/self-determination argument for Texas' becoming American in the 1840s than I could for Arizona's being Mexican in the 16-19th centuries.

I'd have slightly more tolerance for the Irish flag over the US flag, to be honest. But only slightly. There's no claim of colonialist-based sovereignty by Ireland over any part of the US, so it can only be ironic or in jest, and so my objection, mostly formal, is devoid of any further political overtones.