Tag Archives: Hispanic

On Gay Marriage, HispanicLatinos Move Beyond Their History

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The Supreme Court’s decision to rule on gay marriage after sidestepping the issue for so long constitutes another pivotal moment in the development of the new Hispanic/Latino social and political identity.  Like every group that evolves into the consciousness of being an American, HispanicLatinos become in various forms the products of efforts to attain the American ideal — which changes over time.  The American of today is not the American of the 1960’s and certainly not the American of a half century later.  Neither are HispanicLatinos.

How exactly HispanicLations evolve — bombarded as they have been by the sweeping forces that have transformed society during five decades of halycon change — is not yet fully evident. In many ways Hispanics or/and Latinos are still discovering themselves.  Many are sinewously insecure.  A population that goes by two different names cannot be anything but a collection of individuals still figuring things out — advancing the idea that HispanicLatinos are not like everyone else.  Indeed, they are not alike in many ways to each other.  But regarding gay marriage, it would appear that HispanicLatinos in toto have moved past their former thinking — and, thus, their former selves.

The more interesting question is why HispanicLatinos are not following the script they were once expected to read from and, more so, how does one address them in the third millennium of modern time and the third century of the American Republic?

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It is about voting and so much more

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Posted on Dec . 6 for Dec. 7

 

News reports in the weeks leading up to the election in November about obstacles being placed to obstruct HispanicLatinos and other minorities from voting terrified a  friend of mine in New York.  I assured him that the Obama people were on top of the situation.  Of course, the Obama team had a lot of it covered, filing lawsuits left and right.  More important, though, minority voters reacted and voted in greater numbers than in 2008.  Does that mean that efforts to intimidate minority voters will stop?  Of course not.  The Obama campaign is not going to prosecute the issue, and the individuals who ramrodded these unnecessary, nonsensical laws, aided and abetted by simplistic slogans about drivers’ licenses and boarding airplanes, are motivated not by civic sensitives as they are by racial and ethnic animosities.  And that is a lasting feature  of life in America today.

 
That kind of accusatory statement seems to be as pejorative as the unkind statements Tea party types make about minorities.  But the anti-voter laws became an avalanche as a reaction to Barack Obama’s win in 2008.  Previous superficial social conventions were the products of a belief that the country would never elect a black man President in the first place.  So, after his victiry, disappointment gave rise to strategies intended to prevent his re-election by taking aim at all minotities.  The motivation of the voter-intimidators was made evident by the fact that these anti-discriminatory laws were enacted not just in swing states but in states that Obama had no chance of carrying.  So voter intimidation laws also are aimed at HispanicLatinos who live in swing states and in states that in due time will feel their states pulled into a new political orbit.  HispanicLatinos have to be on guard.  Maximizing their political power is critical for their social and economic advancement.

 
But beyond keeping these tactical imperatives in mind and keeping Republicans’ — especially HispanicLatino Republicans’ — feet to the fire, what are the larger issues that HispanicLatinos should dog?

 

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The Enemy Within

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It is hard to see how and why the leadership of the Republican party does not see the danger at hand for its future.  Its leaders are not aware that their party could be only a few years from extinction.  Things do die.  Larger entities than the Republican party – whole empires and powerful corporations, in fact – have disappeared through history.  A political party disappearing is nothing.  On this business of the fiscal cliff, the country already is suspicious of Republicans by a 2-1 margin.  So within a few weeks, the country could blame Republicans for throwing the economy back into recession.  And let us say that another storm like Sandy brews up in the Atlantic next summer, pushes past Florida and instead of wrecking New York and New Jersey parks itself over Atlanta this time.  Already caught in a demographic squeeze as the nation’s population changes, embroiled in an extended Bush recession and then pasted by another blow from the change in climate that Republicans deny – the GOP could be at the precipice leading into the 2014 midterm elections.  They just lost an election that if President Obama had had a better night in Denver one evening might have turned into a landslide.  And now, another storm named Hillary already is beginning to vent its first soft but undeniable breezes for 2016.

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Lincoln and the Questions of Our Lives

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Are we fitted into the times we are born into?  So asks Abraham Lincoln in the new film that should be required viewing for all – more so for modern-day Republicans than anyone else.  The Lincoln in Lincoln is the dream of any Democrat or Republican.  A nation so divided as ours is today, riven by intense ideological rivalries and regional, sectional differences, could use an individual who commands the respect of all to ask the eternal question we ask of ourselves with often vague success, How and where do we fit?  Lincoln did not ask the more important question that has dogged humankind since it attained the power to reason, What does it all mean?  No, he asked the one that we should be able to answer, for we do have the power to control our lives.  Incumbent in Lincoln’s question is the degree to which each citizen and resident of the United States understands his or her responsibilities.

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Two Parties: Two HispanicLatino Vice Presidents

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The attention that the HispanicLatino vote received during the presidential campaign and future demographic projections of its growth have caused the media and obsessive politico-types to speculate about when the first President of HispanicLatino descent will be sworn into office.  The strategic placement of the HispanicLatino population in critical states has made a deep impression on political strategists that appears lasting and could accelerate the election to the Presidency a member of a group that only this year surpassed 10 percent of the national voting electorate.  It seems absurd that people on television are fantasizing about future administrations, but the emergence of the telegenic Castro twins of San Antonio on the national scene had fueled the chatter.

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The Unrepresentative House of Representatives

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As the composition of the new Congress that convenes in January becomes clear as the last of the contested races for seats in the House of Representatives are settled, the complaints by Hispanic/Latinos that they are underrepresented sound quaint — especially with the election of new gay and lesbian, Asian, Muslim and bisexual candidates.  A new set of fresh HispanicLatino faces will go to Capitol Hill, but they are the products of a system that is not working despite the continuing diversification of Congress itself.

The truth is that HispanicLatinos are vastly underrepresented in Congress.  Up until the 1970’s congressional districts were drawn by state legislatures with no equity in mind.  In one district, 50,000 voters would elect a representative compared to 500,000 in another, making the votes of the 50,000 ten times more valuable.   Once the Supreme Court ruled in the 1960’s that each citizen’s vote was equal to another, it was not long before each person, regardless of voting status, was to be represented equally.  Today, congressional districts are roughly equal in population, currently standing at about 715,000 each.  But equal numbers in population do not translate into equality for HispanicLatinos.

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Asking More from Marco

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Marco Rubio has gotten himself into a pickle, hasn’t he?  Is the shine off the apple, or is there something behind that Bush?  These questions forced the first of the faux 2016 presidential candidates to show up in Iowa 10 scant days after the election to give a speech.  Rubio officially found out on Nov. 6 that Americans rejected the fearful-anxious movement that catapulted him onto the national scene in the first place.  The Tea party is not dead but it does not have as much of a future as the ink it gets.

What Marco Rubio said during his transparent trip to Iowa last week is not going to cut it for him or his party – or the nation.  The country today needs real leadership – political brinksmanship, even – not the cautious catnip Rubio offered last week.  The country needs more from all of us.  It needs us to be less ideological.  It needs the no-tax pledge signers to understand fiscal reality.  It needs environmentalists to understand natural gas development.  It needs a new integrity.  It needs less media.  It needs a new way to fund campaigns.  It needs a lot more than what we are giving it.  And it certainly needs more from young telegenic Hispanic/Latinos like Marco Rubio who are supposed to be a great part of the future.

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First heal then rebuild

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Ceaselessly, the babble goes on about the crossroads the Republican party faces after its rejection by almost 64 million voters.  And, of course, the discussion misses the point. The usual post-election hand-wringing in the wake of a political defeat has gone beyond usual recrimination.  Desperation has turned bitter.  Ill-informed and/or cynical political strategists and pollsters had hoodwinked the party’s faithful into thinking they were going to win an election with a nominee who truly considers half of the nation way, way beneath him.  Despondency has conflated into screeching on the radio about the old America dying.  The resentments that right-wing gasbags with microphones spew into the air unfortunately cloud the opportunity that America has before it.

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More of a Hologram: Lincoln or the Supreme Court?

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In my mind the Supreme Court is at the precipice.  A majority of the court has come to personate Mitt Romney’s lack of understanding of the new world around us.  In deciding to accept a case out of Alabama in order to rule on the constitutionality of critical parts of the Voting Rights Act, the court is placing itself in judgment.  No one with a pip of integrity can believe that changes in election laws leading up to the 2012 presidential election had any other purpose – and their authors any other motivation – than to suppress the constitutional rights of certain American citizens whose ballots were to be denigrated if possible.

The willingness on the part of many citizens – and state attorneys general – to engage and use anti-Constitutional means to limit the rights of voters persists, and it can be found in almost any part of the Union.  The most blatant example this year occurred not in the southern states and other localities specifically covered by the Act but in Pennsylvania, which is barely included in provisions related to Spanish-speaking citizens.  The law that sought to thwart better the rights of voters was enacted in Harrisburg, 100 miles from Philadelphia, the cradle of this country’s liberties, and 40 miles from Gettysburg, where the most anti-democratic force ever organized on American soil was defeated, marking a turning point in the civil war between North and South.  To that same Gettysburg did Abraham Lincoln lumber to dedicate a shrine to the fallen of that battle but where, in fact, he rededicated America to the justness of the war and to itself.

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Far, Far From a Status Quo Election

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Years ago as a young boy in the small town of West Texas where I grew up, I would daydream along the railroad tracks in the shallow valley below our home.  I would wait for the high, mighty trains that I imagined came roaring from Los Angeles from the west or Atlanta from the east.  The trains would slow down as they sped by an old salt lake but even so would displace enough air to create a powerful force that on occasion sent my thin, reedy body reeling and crashing into the brown dirt.  While other boys were sniffing glue, I was getting off on sudden blasts of air from caravans of steel that the day before might have sat idling near the Pacific or come from the other side of the country where Sherman ran roughshod over the Confederacy.

One day, one of the trains slowed to a pace slower than usual.  A clump of rail yard workers not far from me waited.  One of the crew stood by a thick iron stick that he pushed away from his body.  As he did, the tracks moved and separated in part.  I watched with fascination.  A new set of tracks appeared suddenly and diverted the massive train to another set of tracks.  That decades-old image came to mind as I sat with my old college roommate watching the returns of the election of 2012 that some observers have characterized as a status-quo election.  It was anything but.  In fact, it was a shattering election – far more important than the pedantic conclusion that Democrats retained control of the White House and the Senate and that Republicans maintained their majority in the House.

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