Hispanics May Be of Any Race

Desi was willing to be non-white. For religious reasons. Good for him.

Some heartening media news on Friday was the story that TelevisaUnivision has sold 18 Spanish-language radio stations in 10 major markets including Miami, Houston, Dallas, and Las Vegas as well as New York and Los Angeles to a new organization, the Latino Media Network, which seems to be led by Democrats Stephanie Valencia (who served as Obama's Latin outreach director) and Jess Morales Rocketto,

At least Marco was pretty upset for some reason:

You mean after decades of living with monopolization by the all-white all-Republican generation of 1960, today's politically and ethnically diverse Cuban American community could be finally getting a voice. Not good news for you, I guess.

— Woke Mob Values (@Yastreblyansky) June 5, 2022

Maybe it's because one of the Miami stations (the one he chose to @) is Radio Mambí, famous for pushing the worst disinformation through the Spanish-speaking community in the Miami—that Black Lives Matter is a "Satanic cult" and that BLM and "antifa" warriors masterminded the January 6 2021 invasion of the US Capitol, and hoped to kidnap Trump from the White House, and also pushing Replacement Theory:

In March, "Cada Tarde" hosted Miami Congressman Carlos Gimenez to talk about the border crisis. The hosts claimed President Biden is letting thousands of undocumented immigrants in as part of a “Machiavellian plan," as Acosta put it, to make them Democratic voters. To which Gimenez replied:

"No te dudo." I don't doubt it.

and that's a voice Marco especially values,  because he doesn't like to openly tell the Big Lies himself (for his own use he prefers the sophomoric style of inviting Black Lives Matter to emigrate to Cuba if they love socialism so much).

Not that it's the plan to turn the new stations into a Democratic juggernaut, unfortunately:

Valencia said [the disinformation] will change, but insisted Mambí will not adopt a left-wing bent under LMN.

“There are elements of Radio Mambí that are really important to preserve," Valencia said. "It has been an important part of the community and experience in Miami.

But we do believe in...balanced journalism.”

And the other not-so-great news is that the paperwork for the project probably won't be done until 2023, so it's not of any value in the upcoming elections. 

A thing from the quiet-parts-out-loud department that really jumps at you in this story is the race issue hiding behind every news story telling us that "Hispanics are basically conservative" or "Hispanics are increasingly turning to Republicans" because of the "family values" or evangelical "faith" that seem to be animating some significant fraction of them. This time it's unmistakeable: if some Hispanophone conservatives are taking the same attitudes as Anglophone white nationalists, it's for the same reasons, because they're white nationalists: to all purposes just as white and just as hauntable by fears of "critical race theory": the descendants of Spanish slaveholders from the Caribbean and eastern South America, the descendants of Spanish génocidaires in Mexico and Central America and western and central South America; those Cuban Americans of Florida above all who are white meaning Not Black and those Mexican Americans of Texas who are white meaning Not Indigenous (as opposed to the many in both places who certainly are Black or Indigenous).

Which means what, exactly? That's very far from clear, especially since the government's method for counting it has changed radically over the past ten years, I believe for the better, by making the "what is your ethnic group?" question more sensitive (in 2010 a lot of responses were so long they didn't register, and the coding was fixed to stop that from happening)

2020 census. "Data users should use caution when comparing 2010 Census and 2020 Census race data because of improvements to the question design, data processing, and coding procedures for the 2020 Census."

But it's fascinating that it's caused the self-identification of US Latinos as all-white to drop from 53% to 20.3%—that's a lot!—those who think of themselves as "some other race" (which I believe is most likely to be "Mexican" or "Cuban") to go up from 36.7% to 42.2%, and those who identify as multiracial to rise from 6.0% to 32.7%—that's astronomical (a 567% increase)!

My takeaway on this is that by far most Latino Americans would rather not think of themselves as white, and that those who seriously would, typically the wealthy white Cubans of Miami and environs whose businesses were expropriated by the Castro revolution (not that I favor the Castro revolution as it worked out) and the wealthy white rancheros of the Rio Grande valley, are probably not really worth worrying about politically—about a fifth of the population, and really just Spanish-speaking Republicans anyway, whose votes are not gettable.

That doesn't agree with the suggestions of Paola Ramos at MSNBC (representing what I guess might be called the media élite, daughter of the saintly Jorge Ramos, and holder of degrees from Barnard and Harvard), who

Warns Latino Parents Concerned About ‘Communist Agenda’ Being ‘Pushed’ in Schools, Causing Hispanic Voters’ Rightward Shift

—but when I watch her documentary footage of "conservative Latinos" in Florida I find that they're obvious white voters, Cuban and Mexican, who are either lying about that time when they voted for Obama or unable to explain why they did, if they did. This is nothing less than a Spanish-accented copy of the Times Cletus safaris of early 2021. Those guys are just pushing the same line the've been pushing for 60 years, when they weren't openly backing efforts like Nixon's to suppress democracy altogether, and they don't deserve the attention: they don't have enough votes.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.