Racial Identity, Latino Politics, The Taíno
Racial Identity, Latino Politics, The Taíno
In today’s Daily Chela newsletter….
Spotlight: Racial Identity?
Top 10: Tejano Conjunto
Podcast: Latino politics
The Taíno
Meet Junco Canché
More News and Links
Madrid: Moving Beyond Racial Identity
Despite the best efforts of many Democratic political consultants and pollsters over the past decade, Latino voters have consistently rejected the politics of racial identity that served as a cornerstone of the party’s efforts to build a multi-ethnic national majority.
As the number of non-white voters grew in the early part of this century, Democrats adopted the ‘demographics is destiny’ philosophy under the faulty assumption that the explosion of the Latino population meant there was a new Democrat born every thirty seconds in this country.
This thinking was, of course, wrongheaded but not just to those political consultants with a simplistic understanding of the dynamic nature of ethnicity, culture and assimilation, but to the very Latino voters Democrats were counting on to build their new majority.
California, the nation's largest Latino state, is the best example of these faulty assumptions. California is a state where Latino voters have consistently opposed race based affirmative action quotas. They generally oppose race based reparation efforts. Increasingly, they see flows of undocumented immigration as a border security issue not a race based attack on the community.
Yet despite overwhelming evidence, progressive leadership convinced themselves that any non-white voter must certainly see the world through the lens of racial oppression.
The Obama Coalition
This emergent majority theory, also known as, “The Obama Coalition,” became such undebatable heterodoxy in the Democratic Party that a growing emphasis on racial identity as a political mobilization tool became central to the party's messaging to non-white voters.
This emphasis on diversity led Biden during the 2020 campaign to promise that not only would he have the most diverse cabinet in U.S. history (he did), but also select a black woman as President (he did that too). For Latinos, his promise was to “not build another inch of wall” along the border (he broke that promise).
As the economy weakened, inflation heated up, and illegal crossings exploded, Biden and the Democrats faced the unfortunate reality that Black voters care about more than representation and latino voters were as much motivated by border security as they were immigration reform. The racial identity strategy Democrats had been counting on ran headlong into economic and security concerns.
Having just been elected on a platform suggesting that Trump's policies on the border, including building a wall and separating families was inherently racist, Biden found himself caught between the racial rhetoric that he used to animate his Democratic base, and the governing realities of needing to stem the tide of illegal crossings.
For the first time in 15 years, and beginning in the earliest months of his administration, the U.S. was experiencing a dramatic increase in the number of undocumented immigrants streaming across the southern border.
Border U-turn
Biden’s polling numbers collapsed. Harris, who had been tasked with stemming the ‘root causes’ of migration from central and South American countries began to look ineffective. Republicans claimed she was, “In over her head.”
Perhaps most alarming for the Democrats was that all of the national polling was showing strong and increasing Latino support for greater border security.
The immigration issue was indeed rising as a top issue for Latinos—but not in the direction they were expecting. As more data came in it was clear, Biden and Democrats had been misled by Latino consultants driving them toward a more permissive immigration posture and Biden’s re-election was now in doubt.
By late Spring, the situation was dire. Trump was consistently outperforming Biden, and the issue where Trump was strongest was on immigration. Biden was growing desperate, and with growing evidence, Latino voters were not where his advisers had led him to believe.
He made two dramatic pivots that would effectively end the political policies of a generation of Democrats: Sign an executive action curtailing asylum claims, and effectively shut down the border and sign on to the most conservative border security bill proposed in the past fifty years.
Biden effectively made a U-turn in a dramatic attempt to get him, his vice-President and his party out of the racial cul-de-sac they had allowed themselves to be drawn into.
Then Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
Kamala Harris
Where Biden had made the turn, Harris had hit the gas. Her first ad was launched hammering home the need for border security, hiring thousands of new border security agents and her history of prosecuting transnational gangs. She reversed her position on decriminalizing undocumented immigrants. The very first ad she dropped to a national audience on the day she appeared as the presumptive Democratic nominee in Atlanta was a fierce advertisement on border security that would have made a number of Republican members of Congress blush.
Had these same actions, policies and stridency been advocated by a Republican they would have immediately been decried as racist by Democrats. Rather they were met with ‘joyous’ cheering and chants of “USA!USA!” just weeks later at the Democratic convention in Chicago.
To be sure this was much more than a calculated move to the middle - though it certainly was that. It was also a repudiation of the same ‘demographics is destiny’ orthodoxy that led to the decade long slide of Latino support for the Democratic Party. It was a concrete recognition that defining Latino identity through the racial prism of immigration has proven to be an abject failure because that is not how the vast majority of Latinos see themselves or their world.
There is very little criticism coming from inside the Democratic party on the harsh border talk and the once loud Latino voices in the party trying to leverage their own politicians on the issue have fallen silent. Where just a few months ago Latino partisans aggressively defined immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship as the key to shoring up the decades long slide of Latinos to the Republican party, today their marginalized voices in the Harris campaign have come to symbolize the end of an era.
Harris, who rose to power as Biden’s choice for Vice-President due, at least in some part to the promise he made to appoint a Black woman to the role, is now perfectly positioned to move the Democratic party into a new era. An era presumably focused at least as much on the challenges facing the struggling working class than those who would prioritize race.
Ironically it may have taken a Black woman to rescue the Democratic Party from the racial identity politics that has been strangling them since the Obama years.
Mike Madrid
Contributing Opinion Writer
More Informative Things For You…
Lists: Top 10 Tejano Conjunto Bands
From Selena to Narciso Martínez to Los Dos Gilbertos, this is our list of the top 10 Tejano Conjunto Artists, courtesy of contributor Joe Gomez.
Who is on your list?
Weekly Podcast: Latino Politics
In this episode, Brandon discusses the state of Latino politics and the upcoming election with Julio Ricardo Varela. Julio is the founder of the Latino Newsletter, a columnist, and the former founder of the Latino news website Latino Rebels. Take a listen!
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How The Taíno Outlasted Columbus
One can imagine how striking the island that was later called Hispaniola was when they first landed on its shores. With breathtaking seascapes, majestic palm trees, and lush mountains, it wasn’t surprising that there were already people enjoying its fruits.
We don’t know the name of these people, but we know that when the Taíno first encountered them around 400 BC, their approach was much different from that of Columbus. That is, they did not enslave and subjugate them. Not much is known about these indigenous people whom the Taíno would eventually overshadow. More is known about the Taíno, despite the Spanish-sponsored efforts of Columbus to wipe them out. The Taíno never died.
Meet Chicano Political Cartoonist Junco Canché
San Diego and its surrounding region have been home to artists from different walks of life for decades. From muralists such as Victor Ochoa and Salvador Torres, who helped paint many of the iconic murals of Barrio Logan’s historic Chicano Park, to Lalo Alcaraz, creator of the nationally syndicated comic strip, La Cucaracha.
Even renowned children’s book author and illustrator Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, called the region home for most of his life. With its unique positioning to Mexico, the region is without a doubt a one of a kind cultural hub with various cultures and traditions.
But perhaps no artist embodies this unique dichotomy better than Joaquin Junco Jr, also known by his artist name, Junco Canché. As one of the brightest, most provocative editorial and political cartoonists in the nation, it’s an understatement to say the twenty-nine-year-old cartoonist and self-proclaimed “Chicano Punk Rock Artesano” has made a name for himself.
Watch now: American Homeboy Movie
American Homeboy explores the complex origins of pachuco and cholo culture which sprouted from American soil more than 100 years ago in response to wartime sentiment, social alienation, and government discrimination only to become a pop culture phenomenon.
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