Up to this point I have enjoyed or at least been mildly entertained by Hillary Clinton’s hispandering. Part of it has to do with the fact that she has hired a cadre of creative, adept, and incredibly talented Latinas who craft her Spanish language and Latino-directed messaging. Her team all but hides Clinton’s ignorance of Latinos in their carefully crafted cloak (dare I say rebozo) of biculturalism. They turn phrases: “I am not La Hillary, but tu Hillary.” They make homages: Clinton walked onto stage to none other than the Queen of Tejano music, Selena, at an event in San Antonio. They tweet in Spanish, participating in #RetroJueves or showing how to say “Go Hillary” in various Spanish dialects. They forge iconographies: Clinton’s posters at events in Texas evoked images of Eva Perón, to an audience of U.S.-Latinos who might not be familiar with the actual historical person, but are certainly familiar with the musical, sans Madonna or with her. Her team has wrapped her in the cultural symbols of the community she desired to reach. (Sidenote: If you want to know why La Hillary is doing better with Latinos than Bernie Sanders, one reason is that Clinton hired U.S.-Latinas not just immigrant rights activists.) But today, my amusement with her pandering to the Latino community stopped.
Clinton traveled to Mountain View College in southwest Dallas, an impoverished and majority-minority area of a town most famously associated with the iconoclastically Texas stereotypes of big hair, big oil, big trucks, and big money. Yet, this part of Dallas stands apart. Dallas is 28.8% percent white, 25% African-American, and 42.4% Latino. The poverty rate is 23.8% across the city, but most of those areas are concentrated in the southern and western parts of the city—the very communities that Mountain View services. These areas are disproportionately poor and minority and MVC reflects that in its population. The student population of MVC is, 49.1% Latino, 27% African American, and 15.7% White.
