This emerges from having heard the latest
Latino USA show on
KUNM, my local NPR affiliate, in which a Mexican immigrant with 45 years of residency here in the US indicated his full support for Bush policies. This is a bit of a hand-grenade thrown into the cyber room, but I'd like to provoke some discussion (not a flame war) on this issue. This is no more "stereotyping" of "Latino" voters than is "Latino USA's claim to be speaking for some mythic "Latino" voting block. I speak from the viewpoint of a bleeding-heart liberal anglo who has lived the past one-third of a century in northern New Mexico, speaks fluent Spanish daily in his line of construction work, lives in a tiny Hispanic Land-Grant village, and has numerous Hispanic relatives due to my brothers' conjugal choices. I list all this in an attempt to establish some credibility as more than just a casual observer.
Traditional "hispanic culture" is rooted in the Catholic Church and the primacy of the family. I will state here that this is a culture rooted in authoritarianism, starting with God, who does not negotiate his authority; the state, (The King), which derives it's authority from God, and the father, who rules his family. A tidy progression of "thou shalts", where God tells the King and the King tells the father, and the father tells his family what's what, and you do it because I said so, no argument, no discussion, shuddup.
Given this, "Democracy" as a process puts individual hispanics trying to assimilate with American values on a collision course with traditional hispanic cultural values. Yes, yes, I know that this is a rather broad generalisation, and I fully acknowledge that love of the family is a powerful force that mitigates the authoritarian structure of traditional hispanic culture; I have seen it at work.
I bring all this up partly to highlight the absurdity of calling Latinos, or Hispanics, whatever, a voting block, and partly because these thoughts have been stewing away in my head for far too long. I'd like to hear some discussion of this from hispanic Kossacks who have experienced this cultural tension, an attempt to shed light on a dynamic tension at work in the process of assimilation from traditional values to democratic values. Can we discuss this reasonably, or will I be flamed as a racist? Lets find out...