Latinos

Last night I watched the actress and Hilary Clinton’s surrogate, America Ferara on the Bill Mahar show. He asked her why, when 99 percent of Black voters are against Donald Trump, not nearly as many Latinos are? She pondered the question for a while and then said that Latino voters are Americans and as such have many different positions on politics (the same argument could have been used for African Americans). My personal experience, based strictly on my observations and understanding of how the world works, leads me to a more nuanced explanation, though in the final analysis, America is right. We tend to paint everything with too broad a brush stroke and overlook the finer points. What we refer to as Latinos really are people from different countries, cultures, ethnicities and races who have only language as a common thread. Some even come from families that have been in this country longer than most of the Europeans. The “Latinos” in southern Florida for the most part are immigrants and descendants of people who fled Cuba after Castro’s Communist revolution. They were from the upper-middle and upper class with the greater majority of pure European decent. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz (though he is not from southern Florida) are examples. They tend to be strongly anti-communist and fiscally conservative. The Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and others from the Caribbean are greatly influenced by their heritage of slavery. Even immigrants from one country, Mexico, come from different ethnicities and cultures. Most come from rural areas and are indigenous descendants of the Maya with work habits that would put the “Protestant Work Ethic” to shame. These are the Mexicans doing predominantly farm work and other menial labor. Other Mexican immigrants are of primarily European descent who tend to be from urban areas, better educated and more affluent. These various groups have settled in different parts of the country, can have different physical appearances and varying social and economic concerns. Thus their politics are all over the place. Those of pure European decent tend to be less concerned with bigotry, since it is only language that separates them and in one generation that difference disappears. Puerto Ricans are US citizens and not that concerned about immigration but worry about things like wages and poverty. The indigenous are concerned with all the issues; immigration, wages, education, bigotry etc. An effective strategy to win over the Latino votes needs to do more than highlight bigotry and must speak about things that are also of concern to most Americans, addressing initiatives in the Constitution, “establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense promote the general welfare (this is one the Right often overlooks), and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” (I’m following the recent trend of waving the Constitution established at the Democratic Convention). Unlike the very successful Republican “Southern Strategy”, whispering to the prejudices of the Southern whites, the Latino strategy needs to be much broader and appeal to our “better angels”.