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The Libre Initiative's Fight to Win Latino Voters

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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.”

Cleaning Offices in a Pandemic

We’re all afraid. I have single mothers working for me, mothers whose husbands are about to be deported, men who are their family’s only support, men who worked during the day in restaurants, and now their only check comes from cleaning. I find my women crying. They’re tired from another job, but they have to keep working. It doesn’t matter how, or whether they’re given gloves or not. I have older people in their 60s who are cleaning bathrooms. Everyone is afraid of getting infected. But even more than being infected — it makes me so sad to say it — they’re afraid of being without work. So they put themselves in the hands of God and hope that he will have pity and that they will not get Covid-19. The thing is to get food on the table.

Continue reading at:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/01/magazine/coronavirus-workers.html#officecleaning

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Rosalía’s Incredible Journey From Flamenco to Megastardom

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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

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After ‘Gravity,’ Alfonso Cuarón Had His Pick of Directing Blockbusters. Instead, He Went Home to Make ‘Roma.’

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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/

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Mario Vargas Llosa: The Last Titan

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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

 

The DACA ‘Fix’ That Immigration Activists Fear

 “Overwhelmingly, Republicans tell me: ‘Yes, I could support giving these young immigrants permanent status in our country,’ ” Curbelo told “All Things Considered,” “ ‘as long as we continue moving towards better border security, the enforcement of our immigration laws.’ ” Yet among the undocumented activists whom I got to know while reporting in Arizona earlier this year, such a compromise is hardly viewed with relief. Rather it is the Catch-22 that they have been dreading ever since Trump was elected.

Staying Power: Is It Possible to Resist Deportation in Trump’s America?

Ever since Arizona passed Senate Bill 1070, one of the toughest anti-undocumented bills ever signed into law, the state has been known for pioneering the kind of draconian tactics that the Trump administration is now turning into federal policy. But if Arizona has been a testing ground for the nativist agenda, it has also been an incubator for resistance to it. Among the state’s many immigrant rights groups, Puente stands out as the most seasoned and most confrontational. In the weeks and months following Election Day 2016 — as progressive groups suddenly found themselves on defense, struggling to figure out how to handle America’s new political landscape — Garcia was inundated with calls for advice. He flew around the country for training sessions with field organizers, strategy meetings with lawyers and policy experts and an off-the-record round table with Senators Dick Durbin and Bernie Sanders in Washington. A soft-spoken man with a stoic demeanor and a long, black ponytail, Garcia was also stunned by Trump’s victory. But organizers in Phoenix had one clear advantage. “All the scary things that folks are talking about,” he told me, “we’ve seen before.” On Nov. 9, he likes to say, the country woke up in Arizona.

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Why did 1 in 3 Latinos in Florida vote for Trump? It's complicated.

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When Florida turned red on Election Day, I was stunned — especially after I saw the demographic breakdowns. Nearly one in three Latino voters in Florida cast their ballots for Trump. According to a CNN and Latino Decisions exit poll, his support among Cuban-American voters was even higher: 54 percent. “Definitely there was a hidden, secret Latino vote,” Jorge Ramos, the Univision news anchor, told me. “We’re seeing a new divide within the Hispanic community. The wall that Trump was talking about is clearly apparent now within the Hispanic community.”

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Is the Latino Surge Sustainable?

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The big question after 2016 may be: Which path will this year’s Latino surge follow? Will it be like California in the 1990s or like Florida in the 1980s? Mi Familia Vota’s Ben Monterroso told Buzzfeed recently that some 10 million Latinos who were eligible to register to vote this year didn’t. That’s more than a third of the group’s eligible population. So plenty of Latinos are already choosing to sit on the sidelines. Will the results of this election decide if they jump in the next time around?

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27 Million Potential Hispanic Votes. But What Will They Really Add Up To?

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Looking for answers, I spent six months interviewing scores of Latinos in Virginia, a battleground state where the Latino share of the population has more than tripled since 1990. I met with Latino Catholics, Pentecostals and Mormons, with legal residents, citizens and undocumented immigrants. I frequented a church and a community center, soccer fields and a dance club. I lurked around Republican and Democratic events and a skateboard park. I interviewed custodians and construction workers, lawyers and real estate agents, restaurant owners and community organizers, college students and political staffers. In all, I spoke with more than 100 Virginians of various ethnic backgrounds.

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When Doctors Took ‘Family Planning’ Into Their Own Hands

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Madrigal v. Quilligan was, from its outset, the kind of striking David-versus-Goliath story that Hollywood and history books usually love — Erin Brockovich with an East L.A. twist. Yet when Virginia Espino began researching the case in 1994, almost all its details had been lost and forgotten.

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Jorge Ramos's Long Game

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Around the corner from Arpaio, near a bright yellow sign that read “No Outlet,” two producers and two cameramen huddled with the Univision anchorman Jorge Ramos, running through their pre-interview preparations. Cameras rolling. Microphone on. “I’m on TV,” Ramos told me later. “I’m constantly thinking about performance and journalistic integrity.” For him, one is no use without the other.

Jorge Ramos Is Not Walter Cronkite

In his 2002 memoir, “No Borders: A Journalist’s Search for Home,” Ramos recounts that in 1991 he was elbowed in the stomach and knocked to the ground by a bodyguard after accosting a politician, peppering him with questions and making an uncomfortable declaration. This time, the politician was President Fidel Castro of Cuba, and what Ramos said was, “Many people believe that this is the time for you to call for an election.” At the last word, the bodyguard’s elbow struck.

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An immigrant’s path to success

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Rarely have I felt so intensely ambivalent while reading a memoir. At times, I battled waves of indignation, exacerbated by Padilla Peralta’s penchant for ad hominem score-settling and his tone of belligerent entitlement. A gem from his closing paragraph: “To the haters, a final word: Demography is a bitch. Holla at me if you want me to break it down for you.” Is such trash talk the best this accomplished scholar could produce? Yet despite my irritation, I found myself rooting for Padilla Peralta’s legalization. 

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A Delicious Melodrama of Sex, Love & Revenge

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For decades, the acclaimed Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has split himself into two personalities: There is Vargas Llosa, the author of dazzling political novels such as “Conversation in the Cathedral” and “The Feast of the Goat.” Then there is Vargas Llosa, the author of two titillating sexual fantasies, “In Praise of the Stepmother” and “The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto.” But now that Vargas Llosa is 79 and has won the greatest literary prizes in the world, perhaps he thought, Why bother?

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It Should Have Been a Disaster

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In Hollywood and at New York University’s film school, people had told David Riker that no one would want to see a movie shot in Spanish without a single professional actor. But his film of real immigrants dramatizing their stories in their native language — the sweatshop on the silver screen — sold out show after show, prompting the Quad to extend La Ciudad’s run from one week to three months. So many immigrants arrived with their entire families that the theater waived its policy of refusing admittance to children under 10.

How to Convince Someone that Killing Is Cool

Reading Mona El-Naggar’s and Laurie Goodstein’s terrific coverage in the New York Times of how ISIS attracts new members into its ranks, I was reminded of a similar dynamic at work in Julia Reynold’s astonishing new book, Blood in the Fields, which I reviewed for the winter issue of ReVista. Reynolds focuses on a bloody organization located within the United States: the Nuestra Familia gang, which runs criminal activities and murders opponents throughout the western states. Despite the geographical difference, the gang’s predatory recruitment tactics sound a lot like ISIS’s method of appealing to disaffected young adults. As I wrote in my review:

Nuesta Familia seduces boys from broken homes with visions of cash, excitement and eternal brotherhood. Then it manipulates their ethics with double talk that suggests robbery, extortion, and drug dealing are merely types of “work” that serve the noble “Cause” of protecting their communities.

ISIS, El-Naggar and Goodstein show, successfully attracts young men from intact families partly because the society around them feels so broken. It replaces chaos with a sense of purpose, order, and brotherhood -- all backed up by a violent and radically conservative interpretation of Islam. Nuestra Familia cunningly deploys a similar co-optation of an established, and generally peaceful, intellectual framework. Its original members

Pirated the civil rights language from César Chávez’s workers’ movement, which has nothing to do with the gang. Yet the sneaky co-optation works. Teenagers who are hungry for accomplishment swallow the rhetoric whole, and through this cunning lens see NF membership – with its daily grind of dealing, intimidation, and assault – as a kind of chivalric code.

That ethical bait-and-switch sounds dispiritingly familiar, no matter where it takes place.

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Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize-winning explorer of myth and reality, dies at 87

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By Marcela ValdesThe Washington Post. Page One. April 17, 2014.

Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian writer who immersed the world in the powerful currents of magic realism, creating a literary style that blended reality, myth, love and loss in a series of emotionally rich novels that made him one of the most revered and influential writers of the 20th century, died April 17 at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.

The Associated Press reported his death. In July 2012, his brother Jaime García Márquez announced that the author had dementia.

Mr. García Márquez, who was affectionately known throughout Latin America as “Gabo,” was a journalist, novelist, screenwriter, playwright, memoirist and student of political history and modernist literature. Through the strength of his writing, he became a cultural icon who commanded a vast public following and who sometimes drew fire for his unwavering support of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

In his novels, novellas and short stories, Mr. García Márquez addressed the themes of love, loneliness, death and power. Critics generally rank “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967), “The Autumn of the Patriarch” (1975) and “Love in the Time of Cholera” (1985) as his masterpieces.

“The world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers — and one of my favorites from the time I was young,” President Obama said in a statement, calling the author “a representative and voice for the people of the Americas.”

Mr. García Márquez established his reputation with “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” an epic novel about multiple generations of the Buendía family in the fantastical town of Macondo, a lush settlement based on the author’s birthplace on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The novel explored social, economic and political ideas in a way that captured the experience of an entire continent, but it also included supernatural elements, such as a scene in which a young woman ascends to heaven while folding the family sheets.

By fusing two seemingly disparate literary traditions — the realist and the fabulist — Mr. García Márquez advanced a dynamic literary form, magic realism, that seemed to capture both the mysterious and the mundane qualities of life in a decaying South American city. For many writers and readers, it opened up a new way of understanding their countries and themselves.

In awarding Mr. García Márquez the literature prize in 1982, the Nobel committee said he had created “a cosmos in which the human heart and the combined forces of history, time and again, burst the bounds of chaos.”

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” has been translated into more than 35 languages and has sold, by some accounts, more than 50 million copies. The Chilean poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda described the book as “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes.”

Mr. García Márquez parlayed his literary triumphs into political influence, befriending international dignitaries such as President Bill Clinton and François Mitterrand, the late president of France. The celebration for Mr. García Márquez’s 80th birthday was attended by five Colombian presidents and the king and queen of Spain.

Yet few knew the penury the author endured before achieving fame. “Everyone’s my friend since ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ ” Mr. García Márquez once told a brother, “but no one knows what it cost me to get there.”

Read the rest of this obituary at The Washington Post online

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Benjamins or Bullets: How Mexico Became a Narco-Democracy

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This is how it used to work: In the 1970s farmers would pay Mexican officials for permission to plant hectares of marijuana or poppy. “Once the fields had been sown,” an anonymous source tells Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández, “they stuck little colored flags on them, according to the arrangement. This meant that when the [government] helicopters flew over, instead of fumigating them they would water them.”

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A Literary History of Alice Munro

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Like so many American readers, I was thrilled to hear the news that Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize this week. I've been a fan of her short stories for decades, and back in 2006 I was lucky enough to spend about two months immersed in her work while I wrote this essay for The Virginia Quarterly Review: Some Stories Have to Be Told by Me: A Literary History of Alice Munro

Sometime in the late 1970s, Alice Munro made a policy of refusing prizes that didn’t specifically honor the quality of her fiction. When the Canadian government offered her one of its highest honors in 1983—an appointment as an Officer of the Order of Canada, which would have entitled her to a pretty, gold-edged medal with the mottoDesiderantes meliorem patriam (“They desire a better country”) emblazoned around a gold maple leaf—Munro politely declined. She didn’t feel comfortable, she said, with awards that celebrated celebrity. Only awards that had been earned by particular books or by particular groups of books were okay. Munro was fifty-two by then, and several such awards had already been placed, like love letters, upon her books...

Read the full essay at the Virginia Quarterly Review