It is interesting to see the national media try to make sense of the HispanicLatino vote in Florida before the Republican primary on Tuesday. The media speaks of it as one vote, and it is in a sense. The HispanicLatino vote next week could be as much as 80 percent Cuban American. But most HispanicLatinos in Florida now vote Democratic, so the media would be more accurate to describe the group voting next week in the GOP contest as the Cuban Republican vote, and they should point out that it is shrinking as each day passes due to its aging nature. Continue reading
Author Archives: jesse
Basic Math: A No Vote is a Half Vote
So a Peruvian student in the country illegally, Lucy Allain, now of New York, last week accosts Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and asks him why he does not support the Dream Act. The expected confrontation occurs. He withdraws his hand as if she were trash, she said later. Aides move Romney away from her. I can imagine how she felt. Romney is simply wrong on the issue. More so, in his world, Romney would be called a cad.
But Lucy is wrong on another, vital matter. Asked by Jorge Ramos on Univision’s Sunday news program, Al Punto, for whom she would vote for if she could, she responded that she would vote for neither Romney nor President Obama, who has failed the HispanicLatino community – and the nation – by not pursuing immigration reform, not pushing for the Dream Act and pursuing a deportation program that in the end will prove counter to the national interest if it stands over a protracted period of time. Continue reading
Barbarains at the Gate
President Obama in one speech displayed why only the angriest of furies that could be goaded into action by a Newt Gingrich can defeat him. As important as the State of the Union speech last night was, so was the announcement by News Corporation – read that Fox – that it is creating a Spanish-language network to begin telecasting this coming fall. It was only a matter of time before Fox plunged into the continuously expanding HispanicLatino market. Continue reading
The Eagle Ford: Hope from the Ground Up
So the story of the Eagle Ford Shale is fairly well known to anyone who reads a newspaper. The story is rooted mostly in South Texas, a poor and often marginalized region of the country that today carries significant national and geopolitical ramifications for the future. The story has to do with the discovery of an oil and gas formation that stretches across 30 counties, some the poorest in the country. Together with new and greater volumes of oil and gas production in Canada, North Dakota, Mexico, Brazil and other areas off the coasts of the continents, the South Texas find is realigning the components of the international energy equation that is essential to the country’s energy security and lessening dependence on the Mideast and its chronic instability. With activity in the area expected to last for decades especially as new technology maximizes production, the importance of the Eagle Ford and South Texas to the country’s geopolitical interests should be evident. Continue reading
South Carolina Sends Message…to Obama
— This blog is reposted from Saturday night; the usual business-oriented blog on Mondays will be published tomorrow. —
Though it is easy to dismiss that bane of the average American – the so-called “experts” – they do hold vast institutional and collective wisdom – but perhaps it is about the past. All of them – from the left to the right – have been wrong this year. And so in this uproarious year, their judgment is now near useless given South Carolina. None of these experts expected that after three GOP contests three different candidates could call themselves a winner. One does not have to be an expert in these things to sense something is not plumb with things-as-usual. I have been around journalistically and politically long enough to be confounded totally by what has happened in South Carolina. For me, it now is not outside the possibility that President Obama could lose this election. Continue reading
South Carolina Sends Message to….Obama
In this uproarious year, it now is not outside the possibility that President Obama could lose this election. One does not have to be an expert in these things to sense something is not plumb with things-as-usual. I have been around journalistically and politically long enough to be confounded totally by what has happened in South Carolina.
For conventional thinkers, this is not the year to be conventional. My thoughts have been all along that Obama was going to sweep over any of the Republican candidates. Now I am not so sure. Will Florida tell the tale? Perhaps. Watching Mitt Romney on television was looking at someone who, it turns out, is not as good as he thinks he is. This business of running for President is not like directing a takeover of another company – running for President is not insider work. Romney talked tonight as if he were talking to his staff instead of the country. His spiel was canned and repetitive. Newt Gingrich offers something new: New language, new energy, new anger – the stuff of which most elections are made and won. Continue reading
Time + Ideas = Success
I recently sat down with a mid-career HispanicLatino who wanted my advice about where he stood in his professional life. At the age of 35, he is in a job that he sort of likes, but not really. I asked him if he had other interests than his job and, of course, as I feared, he responded energetically with a list of activities related to entertainment and sports.
This is a reasonably young man who had he had better schooling and better counselors should have his own medical practice. But he spends his truly invaluable time seemingly irrationally – a product of the kind of neglect that seems to be a societal curse these days for even the brightest of HispanicLatinos. By the time they mature and are ready to raise families, young men and women such as these who remain unfocused end up underperforming for themselves and for the country as a whole. But perhaps there is madness in their method. Continue reading
Accenting the Positive
So yesterday’s blog that Mitt Romney perhaps should consider spelling his name Romñey given his Mexican heritage got me thinking about the use of accents in names and words when presented visually on English-language television. More and more, television stations and newspapers are using accents and punctuation marks to spell properly the names of individuals, places and things. Little by little, the media is reflecting the new demography of the country. Continue reading
Enough already! ¡An eñe for Romñey!
Presidential elections can be learning moments or lead to moments in which the electorate can transcend history. In 1960, Americans came to know quickly that the world would not soon end when a Catholic became President. Perhaps, too, this year’s election can lead some uniformed voters to learn a thing or two about Mormonism – and about Mexico. Odd, often contradictory moments in life can teach important lessons, educate people and move them out of self-induced ignorance. Sometimes the news that informs people can be mundane, sometimes riveting.
Some Republican voters who were once head-over-heels in love with Newt Gingrich are still reeling from the news that this schlock anti-government conservative politician took millions of dollars from semi-governmental agencies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to act as a historian. The mundane should be amusing at best. That Mitt Romney’s father was born in Mexico should not be shocking – in another time and place, that is.
In today’s Republican Party, however, anything associated with Mexico, immigration and the Dream Act that would help immigrant students is electric to GOP voters. And Mitt Romney is personally associated with all three in deed and in concept: With a father born in Mexico of a family that emigrated there and then emigrated back to the United States and that received government aid to get them started upon their return, Romney perhaps ought to consider using the ˜ over the ‘n’ in his name. In an age when an anxious public pines for authentic men and women to lead them into the future, spelling his name Romñey would be a more accurate representation of who he is. Continue reading
A People More Worthy than a Monument
An insistent wind under a pewter sky inconvenienced the crowd of about 150 that last week had come to break ground for a new Tejano monument on the grounds of the Texas state capitol. The statue commemorating the role of one of the original populations of Texas is just about complete and will be laid and dedicated on March 29.
Around me huddled in the cold were faces and names I had not seen nor heard of in a long time. Some of the activists of the past had joined the leadership of more establishmentarian types to make the monument a reality – a reality that will end hundreds of years of exclusion of HispanicLatinos from any presence on the grounds of the capitol of a state in which they are 40 percent of the population. As unbelievable as it sounds, in all of the commemorative statues, plaques and other monuments at the Capitol, not one – not one – pays respect to the population that settled and organized the land as Tejas that later became Texas.
It was impossible to look around me and not think of an era ending so much as a new era blowing into being in which a new history far different from the one of the past takes hold. Continue reading