Free Republic

Hispanics voted nearly two to one for Democratic candidates on Tuesday just as they did in the 2010 midterm elections, a national exit poll shows. In a number of key races, however, they voted more heavily Republican, pointing to a strategy for Republicans in the presidential contest in 2016. In the Senate race in Colorado, for example, where Latinos make up 14 percent of voters, a conservative Republican, Cory Gardner, took the seat of the incumbent Democrat, Mark Udall, in what analysts from both parties called a Republican playbook on how to blunt the Democrats’ advantage with Hispanics. Mr. Gardner...

David Greco, cofounder and executive director of ARTE Inc., said Wednesday he’s confident police will be able to identify the individual who vandalized one of the organization’s “Heroes & Icons” posters at City Hall earlier this week. The unidentified vandal scrawled the word “asesino,” the Spanish word for “murderer,” in black ink atop the shoulder of the Argentine Marxist-Leninist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Greco said a police report has been filed and City Hall security personnel are reviewing surveillance camera footage. The exhibit, which went up Sept. 22 to honor Hispanic History Month, includes approximately 40 posters depicting Latino historical...

Ruben Villarreal knew he was different, and it had nothing to do with his curlicue mustache. The Latino tire-shop owner with the ten- gallon hat had been mayor of this border town for several years before he dared to discuss his political affiliation. He felt like a “cactus around balloons.” “It’s not easy being Republican,” he said, “when everybody’s a Democrat.” As long as anyone can remember, the South Texas counties that make up the Rio Grande Valley have been two things: Hispanic and blue-as-the-big-sky Democrat. In Hidalgo County, along the Rio Grande, the locals say a Republican hasn’t won...

Frequently, left-wing ideologues manage to harm the very people they claim they are aiding. “When your government and your school are constantly telling you that you’re a victim of a racist society who needs protection, you may start believing it at some point,” Mike Gonzalez writes in the recently released book, A Race for the Future: How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic-Americans. mike gonzalez book Gonzalez shows, in part, how government schools are failing Hispanics. “In May 2010, the American Psychological Association (APA) published a handful of studies conducted on Latino students, and they had their share...

A nifty catch by Josh Jordan, a.k.a. NumbersMuncher. Albeit with a big caveat.When I say “lowest level since last year” in the headline, I don’t mean to imply that O’s numbers with Latinos were lower in 2013. All I mean is that today’s Gallup chart goes back only as far as last November. (A period that includes the disastrous ObamaCare rollout, do note.) That 44 percent may well be the lowest number of his entire presidency among Latinos. I’d say odds are good, at least, that it’s the lowest since the big debt-ceiling standoff in 2011, when Obama saw...

That 44 percent may well be the lowest number of his entire presidency among Latinos. I’d say odds are good, at least, that it’s the lowest since the big debt-ceiling standoff in 2011, when Obama saw some of his worst polling across the board. And it’s not just Latinos who are sour on him right now. Click and scroll left and you’ll find that he hasn’t been below 60 percent among nonwhite voters once since last November. Until now.

There is no doubt that the Latino electorate is becoming increasingly important in presidential elections and will become even more so in the future. Today, one in six Americans are of Latino descent. By 2050, that number will be one in three. ......................................................... At a time when one-fourth of all kindergarten age children in the country are Latino, and when the majority of births are children of color, the Republican Party had better find a way to embrace policies that do not demonize the government that is currently seen as a partner of the communities they need to reach.

“I can count the number of Latinos in this state in one hand, and most work in my restaurant,” he said jokingly of the Hispanic population in Maine. But the real cultural shock for Diaz, who lives with his wife and 12-year old daughter, wasn’t that he couldn’t find an eatery that carried his favorite delicacy when the craving hit. His big culture shock involved soccer, his favorite sport. “In my old neighborhood I could walk to almost any public park on any day of the week and pick up a game of futbol,” he explained. “Since moving here, I’ve...

Much to the surprise of those who understand the decline of journalism in our country, in a discussion of how the recent House votes on handling illegal aliens would impact Republican electoral chances, the New York Times actually told the truth. After explaining how the Hispanic vote is distributed in such a way that it will have no influence on any of this year’s contested U.S. Senate races except possibly in Colorado, the Times observed that “Hispanic voters will have even less influence over the composition of the House, which is all but assured to remain in Republican hands. The...

The National Latino Evangelical Coalition will be working with faith-based organizations across the country to open up 600 beds to Central American children who have crossed into the country without their parents. President of the NaLEC Gabe Salguero explained that over a period of 18 months, starting in August, churches and camps will likely receive thousands of children — the majority of whom are from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — while they are waiting to be placed with their parents who are already in the United States or family members in the countries they are from. "We have 15...

First lady Michelle Obama grabbed the political reins during a speech to the League of United Latin American Citizens in New York City, telling the crowd of admirers not to worry — that her husband wouldn’t wait on Congress to take action on immigration reform. “So make no mistake about it — we have to keep on fighting as hard as we can on immigration,” Mrs. Obama said, to a cheering crowd, Breitbart reported. “And as my husband has said, he’s going to do whatever administrative action it takes to fix this broken system.” Mrs. Obama then vowed that Congress...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) LAS VEGAS, Nev. – “I don’t have the background of a typical politician, right?” Lucy Flores told a crowd of Democratic activists as she accepted the party’s nomination for lieutenant governor of Nevada in June. It’s a line you’ve heard before: Candidates love to brag about how they didn’t grow up like those “typical” politicians. But there’s no other way to describe Flores, a Latina rising star who was born into an impoverished family of 13 children, whose mother abandoned her in grade school, who fell in with a gang, who was sentenced to a youth prison, who dropped...

Everyone assumes that Republicans will easily hold the House in November. The dominant storyline among the chattering classes centers instead on the possibility that Republicans could seize control of the Senate from Democrats. But the rapidly escalating immigration face-off between President Barack Obama and House Republicans raises the possibility that Democrats could win back the House — even if Republicans do take the Senate How is that possible? It's simple: There are more competitive House races than Senate races in areas with significant Latino populations. Last year, David Damore, a polling analyst for the firm Latino Decisions, found that there...

More than half (57%) said that people can be possessed by spirits, and 44% said magic, sorcery or witchcraft can influence people’s lives. Even more Hispanic Protestants (37%) – including 59% of Pentecostals – said they have seen “the devil or evil spirits being driven out of a person.” Roughly four-in-ten U.S. Hispanics (39%), including a similar share of Hispanic Catholics, said they believe in the “evil eye,” or that certain people can cast curses or spells that cause bad things to happen. A smaller share (15%) said they have had witchcraft or black magic practiced on them or someone...

Jim Crow is not dead. It has simply changed its face. A new generation of Black and brown youth are waking up to the reality that our bodies are still criminalized. Whether by shooting down teenagers like Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin or by funneling youth out of schools and into prisons for the profit of private prison corporation CEOs, today’s version of Jim Crow laws threaten America’s future. It’s no accident Kanye West rapped about private prison company Corrections Corporation of America locking up Black people across the country on Yeezus. This winter, Stanford-educated, Compton-born NFL cornerback Richard Sherman...

More than 4 million Latinos in the United States have left the Catholic Church since 2010, according to a new Pew Research Center survey that spotlighted the church’s ongoing exodus of Latinos, a group seen as pivotal to the future of Catholicism. In 2010, two-thirds of Hispanics (67 percent) in the U.S. were Catholic. Today, that number has dwindled to 55 percent of the nation's 35 million Latino adults. While close to 20 million Latinos still identify as Catholic, the church has lost 12 percent, or 4 million Latinos in the U.S. over the past four years alone, according to...

WASHINGTON (AP) - House Speaker John Boehner drew criticism from left and right Friday over comments mocking his own Republican lawmakers for their reluctance to take up immigration legislation, rekindling election-year debate on the contentious issue even as President Barack Obama weighs acting on his own. Boehner said at a Rotary Club lunch at home in Ohio Thursday that House Republicans don't have the appetite to deal with immigration because it's too tough. He imitated them whining in protest, "'Ohh don't make me do this, ohh this is too hard.'" Latino advocates and Capitol Hill Democrats responded with derision, saying...

MEXICO CITY—Latin America is the world's most violent region, accounting for nearly one in three global homicides, according to data from a new study by the United Nations. Latin America racked up some 134,519 homicides in 2012, about 31% of the total for that year, according to a tally by The Wall Street Journal of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime's Global Study on Homicide, its first since 2011. Yet the region's 574 million people comprise just 8% of the global population, according to U.N. figures. As a whole, Latin America's per capita homicide rate is 23.4 per 100,000...

A New Jersey teenager was charged with multiple counts of bias intimidation after he allegedly tried to lure Orthodox women as part of a gang initiation. Police said Rafael Laurano-Flores, 18, of Lakewood had planned to touch and knock down an Orthodox Jewish woman in the southern New Jersey township, according to the Asbury Park Press. Lakewood has a large haredi Orthodox population. Pinny Werner, coordinator of the Lakewood Civilian Safety Watch, told the newspaper, “We have not seen gang-related targeting in a long time. People are like, ‘What is going on?’ It has always been gang against gang, but...

With the recent confirmation that immigration enforcement in the country’s interior is all but eviscerated, it is an opportune moment to assess America’s future if its immigration policies--de facto and de jure--remain unchanged. California provides a window into that future, since the transformation unleashed by the last three decades of mass immigration is further advanced there than anywhere else. Nearly 50 percent of all California births are now Hispanic, with the state’s Hispanic population almost equal to the white population. The consequences of this demographic shift have been profound. In the 1950s and 1960s, the state led the nation in...