HispanicTrending

October 30, 2008
By David Montgomery

How fitting that the most Latinized presidential campaign season in history enters its final week with the Democratic candidate looking deep into our eyes and carefully pronouncing 65 words in Spanish.

"Compartimos un sueño. . . . Este es el sueño Americano."

Just two questions about Barack Obama’s new television ad: What is he saying, and to whom is he saying it?

The translation is easy enough: We share a dream. . . . This is the American dream.

But what is he saying, and who gets it? Also, what was the point of buying 30 minutes on Univision last night to run a translated version of his "American Stories" infomercial that simultaneously aired on several English-language networks?

The same can be asked of Republican candidate John McCain, who has aired several commercials with his spoken English translated into Spanish.

Is this just a little bit of linguistic showing off? Most Latino registered voters don’t need to be addressed in Spanish. Those born in the United States tend to speak English fluently, and those naturalized as citizens had to pass an English test. The Pew Hispanic Center reports that 84 percent of Latino voters speak English very well or pretty well.

Also: Nearly a quarter of Latino registered voters speak little or no Spanish at all. Won’t Obama’s and McCain’s messages in Spanish be lost on them?

Maybe not. The politics of language and the language of politics are full of bank shots, meta-messages. Sometimes the language is more meaningful than the words. The language is the music, never mind the lyrics.

"It allows that one-on-one cultural touch between the Latino community and a presidential candidate who simply cannot go shake everybody’s hand," says Lorena Chambers, a Latina Democratic political consultant with Chambers Lopez & Gaitán.

"When you do something in Spanish, you’re trying to communicate a bigger message than the message you’re ostensibly sending," says Antonio Tijerino, president of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation. "It resonates. The bigger message is, ‘We care about Latinos.’ "

But a candidate has to be careful. Latinos, like anybody else, don’t like being talked down to. Fluent Hispanic English speakers are proud of their language mastery. They’re galled by the charge hurled by some in the immigration debate that Latinos can’t or won’t learn English.

"They don’t like to have people assume they speak Spanish, not English," says Brent Wilkes, executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens.

But making that assumption is a social misstep between individuals — like goofily breaking into Spanish every time you meet a Latino. That may not be a concern in mass advertising, Wilkes says. "The ad is addressed to everybody. . . . Why watch Univision if you don’t want to see ads in Spanish?"

Complicating matters, in a single Latino family there may be, across generations, diversity in language, citizenship, even immigration status. Family members will put political information in English and Spanish to different uses. Tijerino says he gets most news and advertising from English-language sources, while still glancing at Spanish-language sources. His father and uncles speak English and are registered voters — but their primary sources are in Spanish, secondary in English.

We’ve reached this point after a primary and general election cycle where Spanish has played a bigger role than ever, and the politics of language has seemed ready to explode at any moment.

You can date the new Latinized age — with all its irony and paradox — to the spring of 2007, when Newt Gingrich, not a candidate himself, apologized for saying that anything but English is "the language of living in a ghetto." To do penance, he went on YouTube — and spoke for several minutes in grammatically flawless Spanish, which he studies assiduously.

There arose the first major Latino presidential primary contender and fluent Spanish speaker, Bill Richardson — who never found a way to let Latino voters know he was Latino without coming off as too Latino. Another contender, Christopher Dodd, gave discourses in his decent Peace Corps Spanish, while Mitt Romney tried some phrases on the trail in Miami that backfired when he inadvertently quoted Fidel Castro’s favorite battle cry.

Meanwhile, on the Hill, the Senate was debating whether English should be the "national" or "official" language.

Politicians have wanted to have it both ways ever since Jackie Kennedy delivered a campaign commercial in Spanish on behalf of her husband in 1960. They have wanted to reach Latinos by any means necessary — but they have not wanted to show weakness in their allegiance to English and "American" culture.

Thus, when Obama does speak of his plan to give illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, he always makes clear it will include a requirement that they learn English.

But this week, he is speaking Spanish. Mano a mano, McCain hasn’t matched Obama’s linguistic feat. But his campaign reacted to the Spanish ad with a statement — in English and Spanish — from Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), who said in part: "This election is about more than beautiful words."

Obama’s campaign overstated the case when it claimed Obama is "the first presidential candidate" to deliver an ad in Spanish. John Kerry did it in 2004 in an ad created by Chambers’s firm.

Spanish affords one subtlety lacking in English to communicate a candidate’s personal style: Kerry used the formal "su voto" in asking for "your vote," while Obama has adopted the informal "tu voto" to make the same appeal.

Speaking Spanish is good as far as it goes, say members of the target audience. But there’s more to Latinos than the language of the old countries.

"Thinking you’re going to reach the entire diverse Latino population by doing a Spanish-language advertisement is as naive as thinking that you’re going to connect with all Latinos by saying ‘Happy Cinco de Mayo’ to Peruvians and Nicaraguans," Tijerino says. "But I do appreciate the effort by Senator Obama."

Source: Washington Post

October 30, 2008
By JENNA PORTNOY

Sylvia Salazar has one foot in the United States and one in Columbia.

“My culture, my ideas, everything that I learned from my parents and my family will always be with me, but this country is home to me now,” said the wife and mother, who will be eligible for citizenship next year.

She was lucky enough to have parents with the resources to send her to college in Kansas on a student visa 14 years ago. Unlike the undocumented immigrants highlighted early in the presidential primary, Salazar came here legally and now helps others do the same.

Many companies that rely on visiting workers, like the Warrington landscape contractor where she works as the human resources manager, want the government to increase or eliminate caps on the number of temporary workers allowed to come into the country.

Presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John McCain officially support a system that lets employees confirm their employees’ eligibility to work in the U.S. McCain goes further than his rival. On his Web site, he lays out a plan that would ensure the cap on low-skilled, non-agricultural workers “rises and falls with market demand.” He also would protect workers against employer abuse.

Long before the economic crisis hit, other campaign issues — national security, health care, home foreclosures — pushed immigration out of the spotlight and the candidates have hardly gone out of their way to bring it up. None of the debates addressed immigration, once a signature issue for McCain.

“Both candidates only talk about immigration when they are trying to get votes from the minorities, from Spanish-speakers especially,” Salazar said. “I don’t think [the presidential candidates] are really interested in Latinos.”

A poll of 1,600 Latino registered voters in Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada found significant support — 74, 69 and 71 percent, respectively — for Obama. In Florida, the Latino vote was split evenly between Obama and McCain. The poll has a margin of error of 4.7 percent and was conducted by phone by Latino Decisions and Pacific Market Research.

The issue of immigration has significant economic consequences for Salazar’s company, Land-Tech Enterprises, where about 20 percent of the 138 workers enter the U.S. on H-2B visas from Mexico and, to a lesser extent, Jamaica.

This type of permit regulates non-agricultural, non-professional jobs in hotels, restaurants, landscaping and other seasonal industries that rely on H-2B visa workers to keep their businesses afloat, said Salazar. This year’s cap is 66,000 people, although the limit has been raised or eliminated in past years depending on market needs.

U.S. Department of Labor statistics show the federal government certified more than 250,000 visas in fiscal year 2007, including 8,873 in Pennsylvania. This doesn’t, however, necessarily mean the government approved enough workers to fulfill all the visas requested. “They’re all competing for these visas to keep their operations running at peak season,” Salazar said.

At Land-Tech, Salazar not only answers visiting workers questions in their own language, but also enforces the policies of the program that brought them here.

For example, another form called the I-9 usually limits workers to 10 months in the United States. If a worker disappears before then, the company reports the employee to the government. However, Salazar says most workers are reliable and some return year after year, from April to November. They pay into unemployment and Social Security, but will never collect either.

AMERICANS DON’T APPLY

The company pays $600 to $800 per worker for document processing in addition to housing costs and bus or plane fare. In exchange, the workers make $10 to $16 an hour as drivers and foremen to supervise mower crews and installers of plants or trees.

“I can guarantee you I have done my best to recruit American workers,” she said. “It’s not that we want to bring everyone to this country, it’s just that we need people to do jobs Americans don’t want to do.”

Some argue that expanding the number of workers will only encourage immigrants to overstay their welcome.

The idea of farming out jobs to foreign workers is especially unpopular in these fragile economic times, said Mariann Davies. The stay-at-home Doylestown mother of four is vice chairwoman of You Don’t Speak for Me, a national organization that opposes illegal immigration.

“Obviously right now, the candidates are not talking about their immigration plans because it’s hard to justify bringing in more foreign workers when we’re in a state of crisis,” she said. “They’re being silent on purpose — it’s a pretty hard sell.”

Davies, who’s an attorney, said the policies of both candidates amount to amnesty and citizenship for undocumented workers. McCain backed away from the issue after two bills he sponsored failed, “and we’re hoping he means it,” she said.

Border security is crucial to solving the problem, she said.

“The issue regarding national security has not changed,” she said. “If anything, it’s gotten worse. If we want to help American families and workers, then we need to be doing immigration enforcement and control.”

From an early age, she said, she understood the “fundamental unfairness” of allowing one group the benefits of citizenship without going through the proper channels while her family and friends went though a lengthy, expensive citizenship process.

Davies’ parents, who are naturalized citizens, emigrated from Ecuador in the 1950s. They did it “the right way — like millions of other Americans,” she said. She watched a 1986 amnesty program “fail miserably in its goal to reduce illegal immigration” and lead to what she called fraud as immigrants scrambled to document when they entered the country.

Davies supported a bill that would have required employers to verify potential employees’ legal status via a free 800-number. She opposes offering driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants as some states do. The licenses, de facto national identification cards, allow people to register to vote, she said.

Overall, she said, Latinos and people of Hispanic dissent have the same concerns as any other Americans — the economy, health care and education. They do not vote as a block.

“Those with special interests are trying to paint another picture,” she said.

The misconceptions about immigration don’t end there, said Judy Martyak, a Doylestown family law attorney who advises Spanish-speaking clients on custody matters.

First off, she said, not all immigrants in Bucks County are Mexican. The area is attractive for people from Russia, the Far East, India, the Middle East and any Spanish speaking country and anyone who can get to Canada, Mexico or any U.S. port can enter the country, she said.

“The reality is people come here from all parts of the world,” she said. “People can come here with a visa and simply stay and not return [to their home countries.”

Martyak, who left Puerto Rico for the mainland in 1978, compared the border to a “river without a dam” that must be controlled. Until that happens, she said, provisions must be made for the children of workers rounded up in immigration raids.

“It looks very good in the newspaper: ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] got 400 or so [illegal immigrant] workers,” she said, “But how many minors are left behind? Are they from this country or another country? Were they born here?”

Land-Tech’s Salazar said it’s important to her and her husband Camilo Sandino that their 4-year-old son, Daniel, understands his heritage. They speak Spanish at home, but he learns English at day care and has even corrected his mother’s grammar.

They also want him to value the opportunities afforded him in America, which is why they always celebrate at traditional Thanksgiving.

Source: Bucks County Courier Times

October 28, 2008
By Greg Flakus

Hispanics compose the fastest-growing ethnic minority in the United States. They number more than 44 million people, but represent only about nine percent of the total electorate. Many Hispanic residents are not U.S. citizens and a large percentage of those who are citizens are younger than the minimum voting age. As VOA’s Greg Flakus reports from Houston, Texas, surveys of potential Hispanic voters indicate strong support for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. But the impact of this group will be determined by the number of voters who go the polls on November 4.

Oct 30, 2008
By Alonso Yanez

Aside from passionate political discussions, populist promises and negative campaigns that flirt with libel, presidential elections also have the peculiarity of rediscovering forgotten groups of voters every four years.

Since the number of Hispanics began to increase rapidly in the 1980s, candidates to any elected government position, as well as the news media, started to speculate about the importance of the Latino vote and paid more attention to that electorate.

The myth that the Latino vote is decisive in presidential elections was born.

"(The Latino vote) is completely irrelevant," says Rodolfo de la Garza, a political science professor at Columbia University and vice president-research with the Los Angeles-based Tomas Rivera Policy Institute. "The myth was created by Latino leaders who wanted to convince politicians nationally about how important Latinos were.

"They believed that would make themselves and the Latino more important," he adds. "It was well-intentioned. It was also self-aggrandizing."

Although the Hispanic population has increased from 14 million in 1980 to more than 46 million in 2008, and has gained more political representation at the local and state levels, the Latino vote is still far from being decisive at the national level.

For de la Garza, a low voter turnout and the concentration of Latinos in states that are not competitive, such as California, Illinois, New York or Texas, cause the Latino vote to be less crucial than expected. While 58 percent of the nation’s Latinos live in those four states, the Hispanic voter turnout stayed at 47 percent in 2000 and 2004, according to the Census Bureau.

Louis DeSipio, a political science professor at the University of California-Irvine, also considers the Latino vote irrelevant because, he claims, it will not determine victory in any major state or in the Electoral College.

"It reflects ignorance on the part of the media, because it lets them make a story where there isn’t one," says DeSipio. "And it’s reinforced by campaigns that very tactically want to tell the story about doing well with Latinos here and there."

Both de la Garza and DeSipio remember they began to see stories in the 1980s about how crucial the Latino vote would be. They think that the process of "mythification” was produced and reinforced by different sectors: the news media, the two dominant political parties and some Latino leaders.

Some in academia, however, don’t think it’s a myth to say the Latino vote is decisive in presidential elections. Matt Barreto, political science professor at the University of Washington, acknowledges that the Latino electorate in states such as California, Texas or New York will not be decisive because the political inclination is already defined there, but points out that, in that context, the white or black vote will also be irrelevant in the majority of states.

"The states that do matter — Florida, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada — are on almost every list of battleground states, of the states that will cause the election to swing one way or the other, and they all have a very significant Latino population," says Barreto.

While the Latino population’s increase has been significant in recent decades, Latinos are not sufficiently involved politically. The majority of them are young, less educated and have a smaller income, according to de la Garza. He says, however, there is another way of thinking about their importance:

"Latinos have changed the tone of American elections. They have created a more sophisticated electorate because they’re perceived to be culturally and politically distinct, even if they’re not. So it’s deliberate and desirable for candidates to speak another language, for a candidate to be cognizant of another language.

"We change the context of the election, but not necessarily influence the outcome of the election," he concludes.

Source: New America Media