HispanicVista Columnists

Mexican Tastes do not include Obama
By Raoul Lowery Contreras

With all due respect to the Editorial writers of the Times, the HOLA OBAMA editorial (February 17) indicates that the writer who wrote it is living on some other planet.

Obama was rejected by California, Arizona and New Mexico "Hispanics" for many reasons. The primary one, however, was because these Mexican Americans didn’t buy into his leftist "hope" message, for they know life in this world is not ephemeral and soaring, it is gritty and real.

The editorial takes note that Obama did well with the Virginia "Hispanic" vote without dissecting that vote ethnically. Virginia Hispanics are mostly Salvadorans and Salvadorans are not Mexicans.

With few exceptions, Salvadorans came here to escape the civil war that Salvadoran leftists lost to right-of-center conservative forces. They carry with them leftist souls that have no embodiment in American politics other than in Obama, the most liberal Senator in the Senate.

The closest parallel to the Salvadoran exodus when the left lost its war in Salvador was the Spanish leftists who fled Spain when they lost the Civil War to General Francisco Franco and his right-of-center-conservative and fascist forces.

While most Spanish "Loyalist" refugees fled to France, many came to Mexico where they were welcomed by the leftist government of Mexico in 1939 that itself entered a new paradigm rightward in 1940 that it has followed since.

The refugees continued their leftist ways and thinking as well as their traditional Spanish distaste for Mexicans of mixed blood that happen, of course, to be a majority of Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

The editorial makes no ethnic or philosophical differentiation between a "Hispanic" in Virginia and "Hispanics" in Chicago, Los Angeles or the Southwest and Texas.

Obama did not do well on Tsunami Tuesday with Hispanics in New Jersey (mostly Cuban and Puerto Rican), nor in the Mexican American Southwest and only split the "Hispanic" (mostly Mexican American with a smattering of Puerto Ricans) vote in his home state.

The Hispanic vote is almost invisible in Ohio, a critical state primary on March 4 so we won’t look to it for any direction. Texas, however, which votes on the same day is a different story. There, the Hispanic is Mexican and comprises more than a quarter of the expected Democrat vote.

So far Obama hasn’t convinced Mexicans to vote for him anywhere except in Illinois where the Mexican vote was slightly against Obama.

Are Tex-Mex voters like Virginia Salvadorans or like California, Arizona and New Mexico voters?

The Rio Grande and El Paso Mexicans are mostly poor and live in a social environment poisoned by centuries of a plantation-like boot-on-the-throat dominance. However, their urban cousins in San Antonio, Houston and Dallas are better educated and far more sophisticated than the rural Valley Mexican.

Nonetheless, when U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson won a special election for the U.S. Senate she garnered as much as 80 percent of the Valley Mexican vote, so they aren’t always a Democratic lock and they will vote for a woman.

Will the Valley Mexicans vote for Obama on March 4^th? Will the urban Mexican in Texas vote for Obama? No. They aren’t that much different than California and Arizona Mexicans.

The California, Arizona and New Mexico Mexican voters uniformly rejected Obama even as leftist Virginia Salvadorans rejoiced in voting for a philosophical kinsman. Obama cannot count on Mexican votes for the simple reason that such voters do not share leftist roots with Salvadorans or Obama.

The Texas Mexican American, for example, idolizes fellow Texan war heroes, Medal of Honor awardees -- Cleto Rodriguez, David Barckley, Lucien Adams, Macario Garcia, Jose Lopez, Silvestre Herrera, Benito Martinez, Alfredo Gonzalez, Roy Benevides and Miguel Keith.

Accepting community organizing in Chicago as service to the country is difficult to accept for a state and its people that for the 160 years Mexican Americans have been Americans have contributed so much on Asian, Middle East and European battlefields.

Vote totals in California, Arizona and New Mexico on February 5^th prove beyond doubt that Mexican Americans are more centrist than Obama and his followers. They also disprove the Times Editorial writer who glosses over those facts by regaling so-called "Hispanic" political tastes elsewhere as a "monolithic" demonstration of the "Hispanic" vote.
__________________________________________________
Contreras’ books are available at www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com