Libre has become adept at two critical skills: figuring out which Latino voters it wants to cast ballots and persuading them to do so. In both cases, it relies on a sophisticated voter database that it has been improving for more than a decade through petitions, surveys, classes and mailers. If most Latino voters regularly went to the polls, it would be harder for Libre to play the margins in a tight race. As it is, Latinos’ low turnout, large numbers and complicated political views make them a perfect electorate to cherry-pick for desired results.

Going into the 2020 election, progressives still cherished the fantasy that Latino voters across the country would line up behind Democrats en masse. Several Southwestern states with large Latino populations — Arizona, California, Nevada and New Mexico — did give their electoral votes to Biden. In Arizona, Democrats flipped a Senate seat. Even in Pennsylvania, Latinos’ nearly 300,000 votes might have been decisive in Biden’s win. But in several states where Democrats thought they would get a boost from Latino voters, they lost. Florida and Texas each went to Trump, just as they did in 2016. In Florida, Republicans also gained two House seats.

Matt A. Barreto, a co-founder of Latino Decisions, argues that Trump’s increase in Latino support was really a function of his exceptionally poor performance among Latinos in 2016. Trump’s anti-Mexican remarks and his scorched-earth tactics against two Cuban-American senators, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, during the Republican presidential primary alienated many Latino conservatives. The so-called surge in Latino votes for Trump in 2020 has simply put him back in line with the average performance of previous Republican presidential candidates.

Even so, the result offers clear evidence that Republicans were able to bring Latinos back into the fold during Trump’s time in office — a possibilty that Garza noted to me during our first meeting, shortly after the 2016 election. At the time, this seemed like a counterintuitive prediction, to say the least. But over the years, as I observed Libre’s work in several states, I saw how it was accomplished. Libre has been playing a long game: training activists, building relationships and nurturing a new generation of conservative Latino leaders. “This is a battle of ideas,” Garza told me, “because ideas have consequences, and the consequences can be devastating.”

In Spain, rumors suggest that Rosalía is a fake created by industry professionals to satisfy market trends. Spanish Romani Gypsies have attacked her for using words of caló (Romani dialect) in her lyrics and for adopting Andalusian pronunciations and street styles in her videos. Catalan nationalists have complained that she should be using her platform to win support for their independence movement. In the United States, she has been accused of “Latinx appropriation” by critics on Twitter who argue that as a European country, Spain should be excluded from winning Best Latin awards. But if you love music, Rosalía’s groundbreaking compositions and otherworldly voice are themselves the best answers to these sociocultural darts. Before she started topping YouTube and Spotify ranks, Rosalía spent more than a decade training in flamenco, one of the world’s oldest, most heartfelt and most complex musical art forms. It is as if a rising mezzo-soprano decided to leave opera and bring coloratura to R&B.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/08/magazine/rosalia-flamenco.html

En español:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/magazine/rosalia-espanol.html

What Cuarón wanted, the director told me, was to make “a kind of spiritual X-ray of my family, with its wounds and its sores.” Staring into childhood trauma, stylizing it, exploring it from the vantage of maturity in order to understand the construction of the self: Such therapeutic forensics are so common among artists that they’re almost a cliché. Cuarón’s brilliance lies not in his subject but in his decision to make himself a peripheral character. Almost every scene includes an event that would have been unforgettable for a young boy: the night he witnessed a fire, the afternoon he discovered a family secret, the day he nearly killed a sibling. But you need to track back to piece that all together, because Paco, the character based on Cuarón, rarely holds the center of the frame. Instead “Roma” follows Cleo — a character based on a domestic worker who has lived with Cuarón’s family ever since he was a newborn.

https://nyti.ms/2Gdz1PP

En español: https://www.nytimes.com/es/2018/12/13/alfonso-cuaron-roma-entrevista/

Why has García Márquez’s magical realism cemented its place on American bookshelves and syllabuses while Vargas Llosa’s gritty masterpieces are neglected? Vargas Llosa’s best books are harder to read than García Márquez’s. He’s less sentimental, dirtier, raunchier, angrier. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” looks like a Hallmark card next to “Conversation in the Cathedral.” You might be fired for assigning Vargas Llosa in high school English. And Vargas Llosa has published so many novels — 18 in all — that the tours de force can get lost among the mediocrities. His buttoned-up public demeanor hasn’t helped. “Gabo” was not only a tremendous writer; he was an expert showman who once worked in advertising and cannily played up his Caribbean exoticism for foreign audiences. When the two fell out in the 1970s, many intellectuals leaned left toward García Márquez, while Vargas Llosa was shunned.

https://nyti.ms/2C7VhYE