What's wrong with this picture?
Other than everything?
Maybe we should look at los elefantes en la sala.
--In order to win a national election, Republicans must make substantial gains among Hispanic voters, a task more difficult than mocking Hillary Clinton for eating at Chipotle.
--Most outreach campaigns will reek of hypocrisy, given the party’s anti-immigration and voter-suppression efforts.
--Nominating Marco Rubio will not solve the problem because: él no es mexicano-americano. Él es cubano-americano. And there’re big differences.
The biggest difference lies in the numbers. According to the most recent U.S. Census, people with Mexican backgrounds make up 64% of the nation's 54 million Hispanic citizens, whereas people of Cuban background comprise only 3.6%. In Florida, Cuban Americans — once the majority of the state’s Hispanics — now form only 29% of the population. And even that shrinking percentage is no longer dominated by rabid anti-Castroites (who tend to vote for Conservative Republicans), as the divided reaction to President Obama’s recent attempts to normalize U.S./Cuban relations attests.
Maybe wealthy Cuban Americans will no longer brandish the outsized political power to which they’re accustomed.
Moreover, there’s a longstanding enmity between Mexican Americans and Cuban Americans. The former see the latter as elitist and as unjustly pampered by favored-refugee-status immigration policies. Non-Cuban Hispanics commonly believe that the United States regards Cubans as ‘worthy’ refugees, thanks to the Cold War and half-a-century’s worth of demonizing Fidel Castro, plus the fact that the first wave of incoming Cubans tended to be educated and wealthy (and white[ish]). And that the United States regards Mexicans, particularly in the last decade or so, as ‘unworthy’ illegal penniless disease-carrying mooching peasant terrorists, an attitude now extended to would-be immigrants from Honduras, El Salvador, and other Central American countries.
It’s their fault — Cuban-American Desi Arnaz popularized the domesticated but still exotic Latin Lover during television’s formative years; Castillian-American Leo Carrillo, playing the Mexican character Pancho in ‘The Cisco Kid’ during those same years, popularized the figure of the subservient and buffoonish south-of-the-border sidekick.
Being Cuban American has been a plus in South Florida, but it’s not necessarily a good thing elsewhere. The Hispanic population of Texas, for instance, is overwhelmingly of Mexican heritage . . . which may be why the Cuban-Canadian-American Ted Cruz generalizes his convoluted family history (was his father a 14-year-old freedom fighter with Fidel? A Batista/CIA informer? Did Cruz Sr. bribe his way into the United States? How many nationalities have Cruz family members claimed and renounced?) into a muzzy Coming-to-America success story through which the Senator can be seen as a pan-Hispanic everyman. (To be fair, Marco Rubio has executed similar narrative shuffles concerning his family’s refugee rationale.)
But Texan-Cuban-Canadian-American Senator Cruz has the identity politics problem solved.
That the Republican Party is flirting with nominating Cuban-American Senators Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz in part to win ‘the Hispanic vote’ betrays ignorance about the diversity of this country’s Hispanic population. It could even be construed as vaguely racist, although ‘Hispanic’ is not a term denoting race (Hispanics can be Black, Indian, Mestizo, White, even Asian): if they don’t all look alike (despite George H. W. Bush’s famous comments about the ‘little brown ones,’ referring to his son Jeb’s children), they are part of an undifferentiated mass of suspect, potentially job-stealing-gene-pool-diluting-and-therefore-dangerous others.
Not that the Republicans haven’t tried to play an ill-conceived Hispanic card before, like in 2012. It didn’t work then, and it probably won’t work now.
¿Qué estás haciendo güey?
As things stand presently, Republicans will not gain much of the Hispanic vote, even if they nominate a Cuban American, because their policies are basically anti-Hispanic. Anti-immigration-reform, anti-Dream Act, anti-expanded-voter-access to be sure . . . but also anti-Obamacare, anti-SNAP, anti-anything that substantially helps poor, lower-class, and middle-class citizens.
But what if Republicans go with the Hispanic majority, and nominate a Mexican American?
Hmmm. Who could that be? I propose that Jeb (aka Heb) Bush might fit the bill. He speaks Spanish well (Ted Cruz admits that he doesn’t, eh), he’s married to a real Mexican (neither Cruz nor Rubio is), and his own children are official Hispanics. Heck, he even slipped up and identified himself as an official Hispanic. Plus he’s a Roman Catholic (he only converted once, whereas Rubio has waffled with the Mormons and Protestants, and Cruz swims with the ultra-fundamentalist squishes). Plus, and most important, not all of Bush’s policies are anathema to a Hispanic voter base. Plus, he was governor of Florida — bring out the old-guard Cubans!. And, maybe to the distress of the old-guard Cubans, he is actively courting the second most populous group of Hispanics: Puerto Ricans.
Jeb Bush rocks his grafted roots
Jeb Bush’s ersatz-Hispanic candidacy still has significant downsides. He’s smart enough to realize that Hispanics are not one undifferentiated writhe of gusanos hoping to burrow into the rich soil of government assistance, but he champions harsh economic policies that make it harder for non-privileged people to thrive and hawkish foreign policy that, taken to its logical endpoint, will end up burdening the poor even further. His own super-elite pedigree (Boosh tres? ¡No mames!) acts against taking him seriously as an hombre del pueblo. And most of all:
Julian (left) and Joaquin Castro
The Democratic Party can see Jeb one authentic Mexican American and raise him two! The Castro brothers are the real Hispanic deal. Hillary Clinton would be crazy not to choose a [not-Fidel, not-Raul] Castro for Vice President (probably Julian, now Secretary of HUD, but having an identical twin doubles the campaigning possibilities). If Bernie Sanders or another longshot wins the Democratic nomination, a Castro would remain a fine pick (or maybe, in name of gender balance, a Castro could be swapped out for Mexican American Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez).
Eso que ni qué. Viva la política de la identidad.
Birthday party with real Mexican American politicians and real Mariachi
[Note: ‘Hispanic’ became the official designation for Spanish-speaking, or descendants of Spanish-speaking, people during the Nixon Administration. Now, official U.S. bureacratic communiques also use ‘Latino’ as a synonym; Hispanic refers to language (and therefore would exclude those of Brazilian heritage but include those from Spain), whereas Latino refers to geography (people from New World countries colonized by plundering explorers from the Iberian peninsula). ‘Chicano’ [probably a shortening of ‘Mexicano’] was a the common term for Mexican Americans and is still heard in the West and Southwest. The problem with ‘Latino’ is that it’s a gender-specific term, making it more cumbersome to employ, and that historically it would reasonably include Italians. Thus, for convenience but knowing that many people understandably disklike this umbrella word, I’m using ‘Hispanic’ as a general term (there aren’t that many Brazilian Americans . . .). Today, most U.S. Hispanics prefer to be identified just as ‘Americans’ or by their country of origin/heritage, with or without a hyphen. I use a hyphen for an adjectival phrase and no hyphen for a compound noun.]
References
Associated Press. “Politics, cultures split Cuban- and Mexican-Americans.” NJ.Com 7 September 2012. http://www.nj.com/hudson/voices/index.ssf/2012/09/politics_cultures_split_cuban-.html
Blake, Aaron. “Cruz’s father says he ‘basically bribed’ Cuban official to immigrate to the U.S.” The Washington Post Online 20 June 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/06/20/cruzs-father-says-he-basically-bribed-cuban-official-to-immigrate-to-u-s/
Cuba 54 Blog. “Rafael and Ted Cruz: Biggest Cuban Con Artists since Rosie Ruiz.” 3 August 2013. https://cuba54blog.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/rafael-and-ted-cruz-biggest-cuban-con-artists-since-rosie-ruiz/
DelReal, Jose A, and Ed O’Keefe. “How Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz are making a play for the Hispanic vote (Wednesday and beyond).” The Washington Post Online 29 April 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/04/29/how-jeb-bush-and-ted-cruz-are-making-a-play-for-the-hispanic-vote-wednesday-and-beyond/
“Jeb Bush Accidentally Described Himself as ‘Hispanic.’” BBC News Online. 6 April 2015. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32199066
Kelly, Amita. “Latino ‘Panhandlers,’ Ted Cruz and the Republican Push for Hispanics.’ NPR Online 1 May 2015. http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2015/05/01/403375859/latino-panhandlers-ted-cruz-and-the-republican-push-for-hispanics
Levy, Arturo Lopes. “Why Senator Rubio’s Lies Matter.” Huffington Post 14 April 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arturo-lopez-levy/marco-rubio-cuba-family-story_b_7058486.html
Mondragon, Joe A. “Identity Crisis: Spanish, Hispanic, Latino/a, or Chicano/a?” Palabras 23 April 2014. http://palabras.clovis.edu/index.php/2014/04/23/identity-crisis-spanish-hispanic-latinoa-or-chicanoa/
Perez, Daniel Enrique. “Desi Arnaz: From Latin Lover to Innocent child, Wha Hoppened?” Rethinking Chicana/o and Latina/o Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 46 - 54.
U.S. Census Bureau. “Facts for Features: Hispanic Heritage Month 2014: Sept. 15–Oct. 15.” 8 September 2014. http://www.census.gov/newsroom/facts-for-features/2014/cb14-ff22.html
Vogel, Mike. “Snapshots of Florida’s Hispanic Community.” Florida Trend 30 April 2013. http://www.floridatrend.com/article/15521/snapshots-of-floridas-hispanic-community
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