politics

I'm half Mexican. Our whole lives, we're told we MUST vote Democrat because we're "minorities." Growing up in Southern California, I remember, literally, being taught that we were NOT good enough to be Republicans. "Democrats are the poor people, Republicans are the rich people..." I remember my 6th grade teacher telling me this. As I got older and started thinking for myself, I realized that I can vote any way I want. It's the Democrats that told me I couldn't. I think more and more Latinos are starting to realize that they CAN vote Republican, and that they ARE good enough...many Latinos have very conservative views (due to Catholicism) yet, they were told they can't vote Republican...

I love it how motherjones insinuates the dreaded right wing is an evil cult.

• Latino is not a race. They are Spanish speakers, foremost.

• The author of the article presumably thinks that Latinos should want open borders, because they are the same race, or something of that nature.

• The author assumes that American Latinos should be proud of a country they were not born in, don't live in, and perhaps no family in.

• Latinos, Hispanics, Latinx, whatever liberals decide to call them, are not necessarily foreign to the soil of the US. Latinos been in the US since before the US expansion toward the West. They existed inside Texas when it was a republic. The Hispanos, that is what they call themselves of the American Southwest, are not Mexican, they have been around during the days of Spaniards. Do you really expect them to identify with a country for which they have no ancestral ties to? Furthermore, Mexican isn't a race. Mexico is a country where you have Mexican Jews, Mexican sub-Saharan Africans, Asian-Mexicans., and Amerindians.

• Some points the author gets mostly right: Yes, an invisible caste system does exist in a lot of Latin America, but not ALL of Latin America. Cubans and Dominicans are racially integrated while at the same time Dominicans are nationalist, and even pan-latin. You can't blame the continued existence of a caste system on white folks. You can't blame racial-ethnic tensions in South America between the Amerindians and mestizos on white folks, either. There are no white folks teaching Bolivians to be prejudice against each other.

• Hispanics may not like a country like Mexico, not because they're racist; they genuinely think the country sucks. That is rational. There is good nationalism and there is bad nationalism. Good nationalism seeks to improve the quality of the nation in economic well-being, or happiness, and security, through achievement. Bad nationalism is tribalism, and you will find a lot of that in Latin America as well. That is irrational because you imagine some special quality of being a national, but you can't quite figure out what. It is an issue of substance.

• What about the politics of Latinos? They do they like the US because it is a country of laws, or do you expect them to look onto a lawless country more favorably? Migrants vote with their feet.

What motherjones wants is to imagine is ourselves as communist, where we ignore our differences and assume we are all equal or the same. Motherjones wants you to think simply of right wing latinos as being influenced by the Ku Klux Klan. They miss the mark so often, I don't read them. Of course, it is about race, that is what motherjones is about.