This is absolute BS and is a major reason I am on FR.
“the Republican Party alienated Latino immigrants, a group whose cultural values had traditionally aligned with the right....”
What “immigrants” could those have been? The illegal aliens who were invading in the early ‘90s? The amnestied illegals and their family reunification relatives who were a tidal wave in the ‘90s due to the ‘86 amnesty?
None of those people have anything in common with the predominantly White, Protestant Republicans who overwhelmingly populated Southern California from 1850 to 1970. They DID have something in common with the Irish and Italian Catholics in Northern California, namely Catholicism. And brown eyes, in the case of the Italians.
But never mind. Prop. 187 passed 60-40 and ONE JUDGE, Mariana Pfaelzer, a Jewish Leftist put on the federal bench by Jimmah Cahtah, took it upon herself to nullify major portions of that proposition. The Republican nominee for Governor in 1998, Dan Lungren, refused to make that an issue because he bought into the “don’t piss off the Mexicans” meme that this idiot article pushes. The Democrat, Gray Davis, said “I am not a judge” and implied he would not try to overturn 187. So he got elected. Lungren’s strategy was an abject failure.
What happened next?
Davis got elected, he reneged, did not appeal Pfaelzer’s idiot ruling to the 9th Circuit and then the SCOTUS as he was supposed to, but instead took it to the 9th Circuit Arbitration service where the other side was MALDEF/LULAC/LaRaza, and the government side was...identical. They all shook hands over the table and dumped 187 in the trash basket.
THAT is what killed California. There was never any chance of some massive defection of Mexicans to the Republicans; they were looking for handouts and they wouldn’t get that from the Episcopalians.
After that the floodgates broke and the Invasion was on, full tilt. Had that not occurred, the entire immivasion would have never happened, and millions would have been impolitely told to go home to the rat hole known as Mexico.
So this is all noise.
PS:
A few years later when this was all obvious to the citizenry, we recalled Davis. Lotta folks right here on FR were instrumental in that. Even printed up thousands of “Dump Davis” bumper stickers that showed up all over California. They said it was about the power blackouts that summer, but it was really about 187.
In the 1980s Los Angeles bussed White kids to minority Black neighborhoods and the Whites moved out of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Illegal Hispanic aliens moved into Los Angeles.
We passed Prop 187 to deny illegals government funds.
Judge Mariana Pfaelzer overturned our vote.