By Luis Alvarado

Last Week one of the most respected Latino organization in the US, (NALEO) National Organization of Elected Officials and Appointed Officers held their annual convention in San Antonio Texas.  In 2008, NALEO invited then Presidential Candidate Sen. Barack Obama to speak, and Obama addressed NALEO promising to return and address the members if he became President.  This year President Obama was invited to attend and once again has declined.  Juan Zapata, President of the Education Fund of NALEO said on Univision’s show  “Al Punto con Jorge Ramos” that the first year he did not show was understandable, the second year was also understood and now on the third year his absence is clearly disrespectful.

The media picked up the tensions between NALEO and Obama, and soon there was media frenzy.  I wanted to see how the Spanish-Speaking media were characterizing this riff, so I Google’d “Obama+NALEO” and found over 350 articles under the News tab.  Surprisingly very few Spanish-speaking articles were written on the story.  ImpreMedia, which claims to be the leading Hispanic News and Information Company in the U.S. in Online and Print, did not write on the riff at NALEO, they just talked about the importance of the Latino vote.  Not a peep on the repeated request to address the convention.

As the 2012 election enters into full swing, there is no question that Spanish-speaking media will once again play a large roll in how candidates communicate with the Latino voter, Latinos will be heavily courted and campaigns will spend fortunes to win their vote.  During the 2008 Presidential race, there was a love fest between the media and Obama’s presidential campaign, even more evident with the Spanish-speaking media, which has demonstrated great resistance to calling the President out on his record or lack of participation with the Latino Community.  Hence why I conclude the subject did not receive any ink on any of the ImpreMedia periodicals.

Another motive to understand this behavior is that of economics.  On the last election cycle unions and Democratic candidates spent millions of dollars attacking Republicans and painting them as anti-Latinos, thus enraging Latinos in hopes of punishing Republicans and raising voter turnout.  Feeding a captive audience with the anti-Latino strategy has propelled Democrats to public offices in heavy Latino districts as well as increased profits to Spanish-speaking media corporations.  Introducing an anti-Latino message against Obama dilutes the formula and both Democrats and Spanish-speaking media lose out.  In the end, ImpreMedia‘s silence on the main issues that mater for Latinos to understand and participate in the political process is deafeningly silent, my hope is that Latinos soon learn to use new information media and join mainstream America in how they select their candidates.

With a new holiday season kicking in and facing a last push to get a vote on the DREAM Act, the November 2^nd midterm elections seems like a distant memory. The results show the growing influence of Latino voters in swing states like Florida and New Mexico. They also secured key races for governor and the U.S. Senate in California for the Democratic Party by repelling GOP advances in the state with most Latinos in the nation. Most notably, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) retained his seat by winning over Tea Party favorite Sharon Angle thanks to  “her inability to stop saying crazy things” like advising young rape victims to make “lemons into lemonade.”

Despite these important milestones, campaigns from grassroots organizations like the National Association of Latino elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) among others, left the aftertaste of being too little too late. They were effective, no doubt about it; however, they failed to motivate Latinos voters to achieve their true electoral potential. According with the Pew Hispanic Center, Latinos represented the same eight percent of all voters in 2010 as they did in 2006. However, the number of eligible Latinos to vote this year grew to approximately 19.2 million voters from an estimated 18 million in 2006.

As the national Spanish-speaking media started to turn up the volume and “banging the drum of [the] ‘you have to go vote, you have to go vote,’” the enthusiasm among voters picked up traction starting only until the first week of October, Latino Decisions reported. Once the campaigns were in full swing, social media also played a key role on reaching wider audiences. On November 28, Latinos in Social Media (LATISM) invited Univision’s Martin Berlanga to participate in a Twitter party on the importance of voting for Latinos. The tweetchat achieved an impressive 8.1 million impressions in one night, according to LATISM’s Vice-Chair Elianne Ramos.

(For the not social media savvy, impressions means how many times people saw tweets about the party’s hashtag.)

They all seem like successfully calculated efforts given the positive election results against the most radical anti-immigrant candidates. However, imagine what they could have accomplished if the media heavyweights had devoted their full resources to these campaigns way earlier in the game. This fast-and-furious approach didn’t spark enough interest among many freshmen citizens who may suffer psychological roadblocks thanks to years of discrimination and disenfranchisement. Let’s not forget that the naturalization process is long, hard, and expensive plus many have to deal with their own negative preconceptions on civic participation. Also, the high educational gap between Latinos and Whites remains disadvantageous against the former.

For the 2012 presidential elections, we should expect that the traditional political parties will diligently work to enfranchise Latinos. However, neither party seems to have even a remote idea on how to tally our votes. Right now, they are busy putting down their own fires rather than making a sincere effort to reach out. Democrats have lost their luster with the electorate and face an uphill battle to reelect President Barack Obama on 2012. On the flip side, Republicans remain overconfident between their trepid loses and surprising gains thanks to a new lot of conservative Latino politicians. For illustration, read the opinion from Representative (TX-R) Lamar Smith and a counter argument from columnist Edward Schumacher-Matos on the Washingtonpost.com.

So what to do next? As NCLR’s Director for Immigration Clarissa Martinez-De-Castro writes, a “meaningful outreach is essential.” For sure, both parties will make their best effort to win the Latino vote; at the same time, grassroots leadership must capitalize on their media partners’ increasing clout. Univision is already the number five national network in the nation and seem poised to “surpass the Anglo networks in seven years, even without the boost provided by growth in the Hispanic population,” AdWeek reports. What a better opportunity to rev up their campaigns starting today and entice every able Latino to go out and vote.

Carlos Macías is a writer for Being Latino.

As 2011 approaches, let us take a moment to review 2000-2010 through a lens of Latino disempowerment. During this decade, our community has weathered firestorms ranging from anti-immigrant rhetoric, to financial extortion, to exclusion from the American educational system. Make no mistake, when politicians refuse to provide access to higher education for our community’s children, refuse to prevent mortgage lender usury, and refuse to fix a broken immigration system, they are disempowering Latinos. Through these instances, we have seen some leaders and politicians stand up on our behalf to advocate for reform. But as this Pew Hispanic Center study states we can’t even name them. This begs the questions: Who is our Cesar Chavez? Who is our Dolores Huerta?

At the height of the civil rights movement, Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez banded together to do the unthinkable. Protesting on behalf of migrant workers who contended with workplace conditions we cannot begin to fathom, they caused a national boycott of grapes and threatened the entire California agricultural industry. Risking their lives and abilities to provide for their families, they made sacrifices that caused actual change. These civil rights icons embraced the role of David and crushed Goliath in a way our community has not seen since. And as we move forward, they are the type of leaders we desperately need but do not have.

Simply stated, our community lacks national figureheads to spearhead reform efforts. While we rely on leaders such as NCLR’s Janet Murguía to beat the drums of change, she is restricted by the 501(c)(3) status of the National Council of La Raza. Murguía has been fighting for Latino rights for years and has done remarkable work. But she can only do so much when only bipartisan or even nonpartisan stances are requirements of her job description. Thus, all she and the NCLR can do is offer their resources and talents to policy discussions and court cases, and hope to empower their affiliates to create a grassroots level change like that of Chavez and Huerta.

Now, this is not to say the Latino community has no activists, because we do. One need look no further than LULAC, NCLR, and NALEO conferences to see leaders from across the country come together each year to speak on the issues we face and how we’re fighting them. But we need more than conference workshops and networking events. While noble, they are just not enough. We need a Dolores Huerta and a Cesar Chavez because they would have protested and called for wide-scale economic boycotts of Arizona that a) actually would have worked and b) forced the repeal of the racist legislation the Arizona legislature continues to promulgate. They would have challenged Goliath, and they would have won.

Unfortunately, we live in reality. And the reality is Gov. Jan Brewer was reelected. The reality is the DREAM Act remains a dream. The reality is immigration reform has not happened. And the reality is the Latino electorate, comprising the nation’s largest and fastest growing minority demographic, remains a sleeping giant. The status quo does not need to exist, but it lives on because we lack national advocates who are not afraid to, for lack of a better term, “throw down”. If this were the African-American community, leaders such as the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would inundate the airwaves with an onslaught of calls for reform that would force people to listen. Leaders in academia such as Dr. Cornell West and Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry would join in the debate, calling for change and garnering attention to their cause. While they join us in our struggle, we cannot ask them to fight this fight for us. We need our Cesar Chavez and our Dolores Huerta, and we need them now.

Matthew Stieglitz received his BA in Communication from the University of Delaware. He is currently a 2011 Master of Public Administration candidate at Cornell University concentrating in Government, Politics, & Policy Studies. After receiving his MPA Matthew will attend law school in order to merge his public affairs background with a legal education to most effectively advocate for Latinos.

Photo Credit: Cesar Chavez at the Delano UFW rally, June 1974 by Joel Levine.

In February, a report issued by the Congressional Hispanic Staff Association (CHSA) discovered that among Congressional staff on Capitol Hill, “Latinos are almost completely left out of key staff positions and are drastically underrepresented at all staff levels.” Further, the CHSA report concludes that Latinos “are not only being denied a seat at the table, Latinos are not even in the same room where important policy decisions are made.”

According to the report, “There is a lack of comprehensive data to assess diversity on the Hill. While Congress requires this data from federal agencies and government contractors, Congressional offices are not required to collect such data.” Thus the CHSA constructed a more-piecemeal approach to examining the “Diversity Crisis” on Capitol Hill, relying in part on a review of The Roll Call Fabulous 50 — a list compiled, in essence, of the most-skilled and most-influential congressional staffers on Capitol Hill — as well as on a demographic analysis conducted by the National Journal of Congress between 2003 and 2007.

The Roll Call list “was released on January 25, 2010, and had not one Latino. One has to go back to 2008 before finding a Latino listed.” The National Journal research showed that, by 2007, among:

…key aides of Members, committees, caucuses, leadership, and other coalitions… there were only three Latinos listed, and one of those was the executive director of the [CHSA] — a position one would reasonably expect a Latino to hold. Further, there was absolutely no gain in the representation by Latinos over the four-year period, rather Latinos actually lost ground.

Losing ground has defined the Latino American experience in 2010. And so at this point, the easiest argument to make involves invoking the ugly white face of ethnic discrimination, perhaps by highlighting a proud redneck Republican or reminding the reader of a Democrat’s remark about “negro” accents. Then we Latino Americans may fancy ourselves victims of majoritarian injustice, prejudice, bigotry in hiring.

From this premise, we can construct an apocalypse of conclusions about the infuriating delay of a comprehensive immigration reform bill and the patently unconstitutional mangling of our inalienable American rights by a renegade Sun Devil governor with bleached blonde hair and cold Caucasian blue eyes. Bigotry is delicious in the American political circus, especially in a midterm election season increasingly defined by dangerously uncomplicated partisan noise.

However, evidence suggests that the fault may be elsewhere. Several top-level Hill staffers with whom I’ve discussed the CHSA report have indicated that the Latino hiring deficit stems from a lack of qualified Latinos in the applicant pool. That said, research published by the Pew Hispanic Center may lend credence to their assertion.

Since 2009, the organization has found rates of Latino education attainment in the United States are abysmal. Perhaps the most telling statistic is that “41% of Hispanic adults age 20 and older in the United States do not have a regular high school diploma.” The same organization published a report last October noting that while 89% of Latinos surveyed between the ages of 16 and 25 say that “education is important to success in life,” only 48% say that they themselves plan to get a college degree. Combine these data with the estimated 65,000 bright, young American DREAMers who get stiff-armed every year in the college admissions process and a diluted applicant pool for qualified congressional staffers becomes increasingly plausible. After all, a bachelor’s degree is required of a qualified applicant for even the most entry-level staffer job on the Hill. Top-level staffer jobs tend to require advanced degrees or certifications, often in concentrated fields of study, and for good reason. Our nation’s highest lawmaking body is an extraordinarily complex procedural labyrinth. Its successful navigation often hinges on the cohesive administration of a team of specialized political professionals. With trillions of taxpayer dollars on the table every year, affirmative action in Hill staffer jobs would seem irresponsible. Indeed, the potential consequences of a lawmaker’s hiring decisions are such that it seems reasonable to expect professional qualifications to supersede all other considerations.

That said, the causes of the Latino hiring deficit in congressional offices on Capitol Hill remain as illusive as its consequences. But make no mistake, Latinos are not at the table where important policy decisions are being made on Capitol Hill; and important policy decisions are finally beginning to be made on Capitol Hill regarding a comprehensive immigration reform bill that will be disproportionately consequential to Latino futures in the United States. Latinos are not the first American minority group to be outsiders in the legislative construction of their own American fate. Decades ago, a Capitol culture of white men drafted and passed a Civil Rights Act in a highly contentious political climate. As always, context is key; but it should be obvious to even the most-casual observer of American politics that the immigration reform debate is heating up. Thus as our comprehensive immigration reform bill takes shape, it seems prudent that Latinos, operating as outsiders, borrow from the autobiographical wisdom of Malcolm X, who recalls learning very young that in America, “if you want something, you had better make some noise.”

The Democratic Party in Sacramento, along with the NAACP, the Mexican American Political Association, and some other ethnic rights groups (including MALDEF and NALEO) are against Proposition 11 because they feel that the citizens commission would not accurately represent the ethnic diversity in the state. However, I think it comes down to these organizations being comfortable with the status quo and the existing ethnic leadership in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.

The San Francisco Chronicle has some good information about Proposition 11.  There is broad bi-partisan support for this initiative with backers including Governor Schwarzenegger, former Governor Davis, the AARP, the League of Women Voters, Common Cause, and the ACLU. The state legislature in California has problems producing a budget on time in most years; I certainly don’t see the need to reward them with the ability to draw legislative districts yet again.

You can read more about Proposition 11 here and here.

I think that Hillary Clinton is intelligent and savvy enough to realize that supporting Barack Obama for the presidency will help advance her own agenda, which in reality is not that different from Senator Obama’s. Hillary Clinton kept telling us that she was fighting for women’s rights, children’s rights, and for comprehensive health care for all Americans. Electing Barack Obama will bring us closer to achieving those goals than will supporting Senator McCain or even opting to not vote for president because some are bitter that Clinton did not win the nomination. I really wonder how not supporting Senator Obama will help advance Senator Clinton’s agenda in the Senate for those folks who are angry that she did not win. Furthermore, what real alternative is there in the race that would help advance the causes that Senator Clinton supports?

All of this brings me to another point. What does the Republican Party have to offer Latinos any way? I certainly am not implying that just because one is Latino that he or she should register Democratic. As I have tried to point out, there are issues beyond immigration that are salient to us. Aside from the overtly unwelcoming stance, why would your typical Latino citizen consider registering Republican? The days of fiscal conservatism are gone, as is evidenced by the outrageous bills our current Commander in Chief has managed to rack up in Iraq. Who would have thought that a Democratic President would have based his economic policy on a balanced budget? Also, I don’t think that we are really any safer despite the war and the creation and expansion of the Department of Homeland Security. The whole morality argument has managed to explode in the face of the GOP. The same party that brought you family values gave us Senator Larry Craig, Congressman Mark Foley, and Senator Vitter. This kind of hypocrisy doesn’t fly with Latinos, who are very family oriented, as it shouldn’t for other Americans either. So maybe someone out in blogsphere can help me identify some issues that the current GOP leadership has been addressing or plans to address that would inspire Latinos to jump on the red train. Any takers?

As I end this post, I also found this article coming out in next week’s Newsweek. A little more food for thought.

First off, how many of you know that Mitt Romney’s dad was born in Mexico? That’s right, George W. Romney, father of Mitt, was born in Chihuahua, Mexico. George Romney’s grandparents were polygamous Mormons who left the United States when the federal government began to crack down on the practice. Today there are still Mormons in this part of Mexico, including some distant relatives of Mitt Romney. If you look at this article and scroll down, you will see a picture of some of the Romneys who currently live in Colonia Juarez, Chihuahua, a Mormon enclave. From what I understand, polygamy was illegal in Mexico when the Mormons first settled there, and as far as I can tell, it is still not permitted. Apparently, this particular group of Mormons in Colonia Juarez does not practice polygamy today, but there are fundamentalist sects, broken off from the main LDS church, engaging in the controversial practice in Mexico, parts of Canada and here in the US. Today, Mitt Romney ironically, takes a very anti-immigration stance. His ancestors immigrated to Mexico to have multiple wives, while immigrants from Mexico come to the United States primarily for economic reasons today. While I believe that we need some sort of comprehensive immigration reform, I was hoping that Mr. Romney would be a little more sympathetic to our neighbors south of the border given his connection to Mexico. Last year, Romney spoke positively about providing a path toward citizenship for illegal immigrants, but it sounds like he has heightened the anti-immigration rhetoric, saying that illegal immigrants should get in line to come to the US. Uh, can anyone tell me where this line is? Is it outside of the local Home Depot store where American builders and contractors wait to pick up undocumented day laborers?

Mitt Romney also has a terrible record on diversity. While I can’t wait for George Bush’s administration to end, I have to give him a little credit for making an effort to create a somewhat diverse cabinet. GWB’s people might not be the most competent, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t Latinos, blacks, Asians, women, and gays who have the qualifications and who could do a wonderful job. Earl Ofari Hutchinson writes that Romney had an atrocious record as governor of Massachusetts for appointing minorities and women to judicial posts. It wasn’t until his last year in office that he made more appointments of women and minorities, which seems to be a calculated move as he was gearing up for the big run.

And even though he doesn’t like to talk about it, there’s the whole Mormon issue, which I started to address in mentioning Romney’s own familial immigration story. I respect anyone’s right to practice a faith, but this is a rather peculiar religion. Up until 1978, blacks were not allowed to be in the Mormon priesthood. Additionally, Mormons believe that the Native Americans came from the Holy Land and were marked with darker skin to identify their wickedness. If you read the Wikipedia definition of a Lamanite, you will gain some insight. So among the Mormon faithful, those of us with Native American lineage bear the mark of the curse of God. Oddly enough, Mormons have a hard time trying to refute the piles of data suggesting that Native Americans came here from Asia. Imagine telling the Palestinians and Jews in the Holy Land that we have a stake there too?!

Now, some might say that we should ignore this whole Mormon thing, but I don’t think that we should dismiss it so easily. Sure, people of color have not always been treated well by modern religious sects, and yes, 47 years ago, JFK had to explain that he would govern separate from the Catholic church. But note that JFK did not go on a Catholic mission, aiming to convert people to his faith. Mitt Romney skipped out on the Vietnam War to go proselytize for a faith that had and still has exclusionary values. If you look at the biographies of Romney’s sons, they, like their father, all attended the Mormon college, BYU. How many Catholics, Jews, or Protestants send all of their children to schools within their faith? As Catholic as the Kennedys are, you don’t see them all rushing off to Notre Dame or Boston College. I find the college choice of the Romney boys, given their vast resources to study in so many places, a little strange, don’t you? But wait, it gets even better with these kids. Romney has stated that his sons are serving our country by working on his campaign when asked why none of them are serving in Iraq. I’m sure that many of the soldiers in Iraq would rather sit on a campaign bus and tour the country instead of sweating in the scorching hot desert trying to avoid improvised explosives. By the way, Romney supports the war in Iraq.

The other issue I have with Romney has to do with his continual flip flopping on the issues. He’s done this with abortion. He once was pro-choice at least in public, but now he’s pro-life. As I pointed out, he did have a more progressive point of view regarding immigration, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. He is also heavily invested in the gambling industry, specifically the MGM Mirage. Just the other day, I heard Romney say something about cleaning up moral pollution on the TV and internet. If he wants to jump on the morality band wagon, wouldn’t it be wise to put his money where his mouth is, especially in regards to gambling, and just avoid those holdings altogether? Also, as I understand it, Mormons are not supposed to gamble. For someone who has been a missionary and leader in his church, how does he personally reconcile the gambling investments with his faith’s teachings? Romney also owns stock in a company that conducts business in the Sudan and Iran, but he states that he was prevented from directing the use of these funds as this money was secured in a blind trust. How convenient, huh? Mr. Romney just removes himself from his wealth with the good old blind trust excuse. He is very much a “do as I say, not as I do” type of person. I don’t think that we can endure another four years of these kinds of “family values.”

Finally, Romney also skipped out on attending the National Association of Latino Elected Officials and National Council of La Raza conferences as well. I don’t even think that he sent one of his sons to do outreach at two of our major conferences. I’m going to end this post with a picture of the Romneys. Notice there aren’t any “little brown ones.” Of course, the Romneys don’t need to include us in their private lives should they chose not to, but I have a feeling that if this guy gets in office that his administration will resemble this picture in a way that won’t be good for us.