Let’s stop treating “Hispanics” as a monolith. Some Spanish speakers from some LatAm countries (Colombia, Cuba, Peru and Chile, for example) tend to be conservative, both socially and politically.
The great majority of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans are not, mainly because they were poor and uneducated in their home countries and were absorbed into the Democratic Party as soon as they got here.
However, the thing that is true among all Latin American cultures is a great love of entrepreneurship. The dream of every Dominican arriving in New York was to start his own little grocery store or car service or some other business, and this was true of Puerto Ricans, too. If you look at Mexican areas, you’ll see hundreds of little businesses, founded by Mexican immigrants (look at black areas, and you’ll see almost no black-founded or owned small businesses).
So the appeal that must be made by Republicans is to the fundamental desire for independence and financial achievement that is the basis of Latin American entrepreneurship.
Latinos from any Hispanic country are not politically monolithic because they spring from a class (and racial) structure within those countries. Unfortunately, the social arithmetic is all wrong for the Republican and Conservative cause. These countries all have a huge and explosively growing underclass of mostly indigenous native ancestry, a comparatively small, numerically stable middle class, with proportionately more European ancestry, and a very small upper class, of mostly European ancestry. This demography is hardly a mystery.
I was personally assured by Karl Rove that "Mexican-Americans would be the Republicans of the Future." He wisely did not put a date on the word "Future." If 20% of legal hispanic voters in the US go Republican, consider it a minor miracle.
So the appeal that must be made by Republicans is to the fundamental desire for independence and financial achievement that is the basis of Latin American entrepreneurship.
Well, OK. But let's face it, that ought to be self- evident to this "Latino entrepreneurial class." Instead, we get Republican pandering to the largely illegal immigrant community with their anchor babies ... people who are 5 generations away from even considering the Republican Party; people who are in many cases, already illegally voting for, or being voted by, the Democrats.
Good post. Thank you.
I work weekly with numerous Hispanic families, most of them from Mexico. I don’t talk to them about politics. What I do know is that they are hard working and have a deep love and committment for their families.
The second paragraph of your post is spot on. And those who were “absorbed” can certainly be persuaded otherwise, because their values are conservate.
I generally agree with you. What is hard to overcome is the cultural bias toward getting the most possible from the largesse of a generally oppressive patrón. Socialism looks like a kindly patrón.
But in a sense, we have a golden opportunity to educate entrepreneurial hispanics in conservative principles. They are a select population, motivated to understand the benefits of enlightened self-interest.
On the other hand, those who come here “to do the work whites won’t do” are obviously low probability candidates for ever imbibing conservative principles, being here simply to draw out of the system what they can.
BTW, I have observed this dichotomy at work since 1993 in Chile, living there eight years and continuing with projects right now. Socialist principles tend to have the upper hand because they appear to be more “humane” that capitalism. But a conservative was just elected Prez. We’ll see.