Commentary & Cuentos

Thoughts on Race, Politics, and Pop Culture

Latinos and the Liberal Establishment: A Short History

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In Berkeley, CA in 1964, Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio decried the old institutions of social change had been compromised.  Unions, universities, the government, all had been bureaucratized, which meant in the langue of their time, sterilized, scrubbed clean, and removed of their humanity.  Liberalism had failed them; in the quest for systematic reform the engine of social changed and stalled and become a monstrous machine instead.

The time for radical change, possibly revolution, had come.  It was time to destroy, to sacrifice all in an effort to make the uncaring machinations end.  Savio passionately urged his fellow students:

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, make you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! Put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon the apparatus—and you’ve got to make it stop!  And you’ve got ot indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it—that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!

It was not just the white college students who voiced a general frustration with American society and politics.  Young Chicanas, Chicanos, Native-Americans, and African-Americans all voiced their anger over government failure to address the problems that affected them.  In the decades since the Great Depression, Americans had turned to the government as the main institution to provide them protection from a wildly fluctuating economic system that they were almost all universally dependent upon but had no control over individually.  The state, through mindfully managed macroeconomic planning and social programs, would provide regular workers and citizens a certain level of security.  But as the decades wore on, it seemed that the promises of liberalism and the proposed economic solutions were not reaching minority communities.

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The Rise and Fall of Marco Rubio: How Republicans Failed to Woo Latinos

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On March 15, 2016 after a devastating primary loss in his home state of Florida, Marco Rubio suspended his campaign.  He won only one county, Miami-Dade.  He was utterly bested by Donald Trump.  His loss could very well mark the end of his career.  He will lose his seat in the senate and the Florida primary revealed his limited electability at the state level.  His defeat and subsequent retreat doesn’t mean he should be forgotten.  Rubio, more than any other figure in the Republican Party, explains how the GOP understands the Latino community.  Rubio was not a happenstance shooting-star, the wish of a wayward party come to life.  His rise was certainly meteoric but this meant that he was destined for a crash-course and an eventual burn-out.  His rise was always connected to his fall.  Rubio’s place in the Republican Party was predicated on the fundamental misunderstandings of the Latino community by the party itself.

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Keeping Things Up-to-Date

Readers, thank you for all your support.  I have not posted in a while, but only because recently I have had great opportunities to publish with NPR’s LatinoUSA and LatinoRebels.com.

Back on February 17, 2016, I explained the bizarre exchange between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.  Rubio managed to get under Cruz’s skin with a comment about Cruz not speaking Spanish.  Cruz, an award-winning debater, broke character and engaged Rubio.  The exchange between two Cuban-Americans trying to explain who was more draconian in their immigration policies in Spanish was the collision of two competing strands in the GOP.  I outlined this for NPR’s LatinoUSA.  You can read the story here.

On March 7, 2016, I examined the New Yorker’s  recent coverage of Latinos in U.S. politics for LatinoRebels.com.  While the New Yorker has covered many issues in Latin America and has also featured Latin American authors, it has struggled with its U.S.-Latina/o coverage.  While the writing was good–the signature style of the magazine–the framing was rough and uneven.  You can read “The Talk of the Brown” here.

On March 14, 2016 for NPR’s LatinoUSA, I explained why the eighth Democratic debate was a historic event.  For two hours that evening the seismic shift in American culture was on display and the debate was at its epicenter.  Latinos tried to turn their social presence into political power that night.  The debate showed that “English Only” was not a realistic policy or possibility.   For two hours, Latinos showed their adeptness at linguistic and cultural code-switching.  For two hours, Latinos turned Spanish into the official language of American politics.  You can read my analysis of the cultural and historical importance of the debate here.

I will continue to blog right here and will continue to publish with these top-notch outlets.  Keep checking-in for more commentary and cuentos.

Generation Gaps and Ideological Divides: What Hillary and Bernie Could Learn from Chicana/o History

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Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are having real problems reaching out to groups that they will need to win election.  Clinton is losing young voters, including young women.  Sanders has not managed to appeal to many minority voters (although after sharp and intelligent criticisms, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Hector Luis Alamo will vote for Sanders and he significantly reduced Clinton’s lead with Latinos in the Nevada caucus).  They have struggled to explain their lack of support among these populations, but it’s relatively easy.

Their political identities and primary lenses for viewing the world were forged in the midst of mid-20th century modernist certainty.  That is, their key identities—class for Sanders, gender for Clinton—were formed during a moment in history when these constructs were seen in monolithic, whole, and certain terms.  For socialists, and other leftists, class trumped race and all other identities were bourgeois mystification, fabrications made up by a capitalist elite to divide the working-class.  Gender too was similar.  Women were one in a global sisterhood of solidarity against male-based exploitation.  In the students groups of the long decade of the ‘60s that proved formative for Sanders and Clinton, gender and class were primary, unquestionable truths—truths that would speak to power and bring it down.

But, the student groups of ‘60s and ‘70s were overwhelmingly white and middle-class.  The universals that these explanatory monoliths were based in were flawed.  People of color, and especially women of color, found the rigidity of the groups’ explanatory models limiting.  There were already cracks in the facades of solidarity forming in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  Clinton and Sanders have carried these limitations with them into their politics of a very different century with a very different economy.

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Latino Appointments, Endorsements and the Changing Political Establishment

Lacking a diverse field but needing a diverse electorate has forced Democrats to build their outreach efforts.  The growing Latino electorate has led to a seemingly unprecedented amount of Latino staffing appointments and key Latino endorsements.  Both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have hired a cadre of Latino staffers, organizers, directors, and volunteers.

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While the Republican field of presidential candidates is soon to be whittled down after the New Hampshire primary, the Democratic race now only features Clinton and Sanders.  Martin O’Malley dropped out of the presidential race after running a hard-fought, policy-driven campaign that never caught on with voters.  Jorge Rivas, the national correspondent at Fusion, declared that he was “the most progressive candidate in history on immigration,”  after O’Malley’s withdrawal.  I wrote on O’Malley’s pro-Latino policies that fell on deaf ears as well. O’Malley’s exit means that Latino issues may receive less attention in subsequent debates—the February 4, 2016 debate had no discussion of race or immigration—but that does not mean Latinos will figure less in the campaigns, especially given the demographics of the coming Nevada caucuses.

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Latinos and the Lost Message of Martin O’Malley

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On January 21, 2016, The National Review ran a story titled “Iowa Latinos Left High and Dry by Presidential Candidates.”  The article, written by Matt Vasilogambros, tells the story of Latino activists in Iowa, feeling left out and forgotten in the race for votes.  The activists complained that neither the Hillary Clinton nor the Bernie Sanders campaign paid Latinos sufficient attention.  Yet, on the same day that Vasilogrambros’ story broke, the significant Iowan Spanish-language newspaper El Latino announced their endorsement of Martin O’Malley.  The endorsement rang enthusiastic: “Martin O’Malley es el candidato más pro latino y pro inmigrante en la historia de este país.  Se merece nuestro apoyo, y este periódico, se lo brinda orgullosamente.”  The next day, in the Des Moines Register, Karina Alvarez, an Iowan immigrant rights activist, explained why “she was switching her vote from Sanders to O’Malley.”  After explaining that Sanders’ voted against immigration reform, went on Lou Dobbs Tonight and spoke about immigrants taking jobs from Americans, and defending the Minutemen, a gun-toting rightwing vigilante group that claimed to defend the border from an invading horde, she decided that O’Malley was the “only one with the record that our community needs.” Even Christian Ucles, the political director for the Iowa branch of the League of Latin American Citizens, who spoke cynically about the hispandering prevalent in the state in Vasilogambros’ article, was impressed by Martin O’Malley’s Latino outreach efforts.

This may come as a surprise to many voters.  After multiple Democratic debates in which most of the attention was focused on Clinton and Sanders, why would Spanish-language newspapers in Iowa endorse Martin O’Malley?  Why would Latino activists be choosing O’Malley, the Democratic dark horse?  His polling numbers are anywhere from 1 to 3 percent nationally and  he almost did not make it into the Democratic debate on January 17, 2016, with his numbers sitting at 6.4 percent in Iowa.  The endorsements and Vasilogambros’ article make clear that O’Malley is paying attention to Latinos.  But why has this affable, attractive, and capable politician remained on the political margins?

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Part II of a History of Latino Conservatism: The Rise of Latino Neoliberalism

As covered in part I, Latino conservatism is not an outlier or a historical aberration.  Many of its features developed over the course of the early twentieth century and were, at first, fused to civil right goals.  Civil rights social conservatism accepted the idea that racial and economic inequality was not the product of structural problems, but individual failings.  For these middle-class mid-20th century Latinos, Anglos did not systematically exclude Latinos, nor did they make Latinos poor.  Instead, Latinos kept themselves in poor economic conditions and in segregated neighborhoods because they refused to assimilate, learn English, become educated, and be industrious with their time and money.  Groups like LULAC and the American GI Forum subscribed to these types of ideas for much of their histories.

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History of Latino Conservatism (Part I)

The coming presidential election has brought Latinos into the spotlight.  Primarily, Democratic presidential hopefuls have reached out to the community, hiring key immigration activists and political actors. Yet, it is the Republican Party that has brought forward two Latino presidential candidates, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.  But how did a party known most recently for its anti-immigrant stance produce the first two Latino presidential candidates?  Many have wondered about how Latinos could be conservatives or if Latino conservatism is an oxymoron.  United Farm Worker Union (UFW) co-founder Dolores Huerta even called them “sellouts,” a term with a long history associated with elected Latino officials.  Luis Valdez, founder of Teatro Campesino, a Chicano theater troupe associated with the UFW, wrote a 1967 play called “Los Vendidos” aimed at Mexican-American appointees of Ronald Reagan, who was then governor of California.

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More recently, the Republican autopsy after the 2012 elections pinpointed Latino voters as key to Republican electoral success, yet Republicans in general have only doubled-down on anti-immigrant and anti-Latino rhetoric.  Citizen militias, 2nd Amendment activists, and Tea Party activists supported the rhetoric of politicians that targeted Latinos and immigrants as the source of American political and social decline.  Almost all on the far right, and increasingly in the mainstream, believed that immigrants were destroying American culture.  And yet, Rubio and Cruz came to the fore.  Does this mark the beginning of a new era of Latino conservatism or is this an anomaly?

It is probably a little of both.  Latino conservatism is not an aberration.  It has a long history within the Latino community in the U.S. and it continues today.  Interestingly, in many moments in history it has even intersected with civil rights activism.  It is important to note, that there are many types of conservatism and not all of them have strong traditions in the Latino community.

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From the Frontlines of Hillary’s Hispandering

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.

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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.

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Trump and the Tragicomedy of American Politics

Presidential hopeful Donald Trump is slated to host Saturday Night Live and Latino groups across the country have organized to protest the show.  For those who want SNL to rescind the offer, Trump is the symbol of a resurgent and unapologetic nativism and racism that is directly aimed at Latinos.  The show’s uneven history with diversity also points to the problematic issue of representation and white privilege.  The fact that a show which refuses to acknowledge its own institutionalized racism is joining forces with a personality who is quite comfortable with his public bigotry highlights the built-in nature of racialized power in this nation.  It is the institutional equivalent of the statement, “I’m not racist but…”

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Trump’s appearance on SNL is not inconsequential.  Comedy has, in many ways, replaced journalism as the primary institution that keeps politics honest.  Today, journalists that ask difficult questions are forced out of press rooms and criticized by their peers for being “activists.”  Satire like The Daily Show, Colbert Report, The Nightly Show, and Last Week Tonight have revealed nightly news shows and newsclips to be absurdist performances that operate outside of the confines of truth or policy.  It is a dangerous moment when comedians are more interested in uncovering the truth and journalists are reduced to framing an unmoored “story.”  What happens when our politics become performance?  Trump happens.

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