The Guadalajara Reporter

Trying to explain the GOP primaries to Mexican friends, as many Republicans suggest the party may be self-destructing

It has become more and more difficult to explain the United States presidential election process to Mexican friends. (This predicament is glittery with irony, because after 20 Republican debates it’s become difficult for most U.S. citizens to make coherent sense of what’s going on.) The picky interest in the U.S. political process for many of my Mexican friends and acquaintances is relatively new — certainly it’s a newly informed interest. The quickly spreading appearance of computers in middle-class homes here — and in poorer households, where hand-me-down PCs are appearing — means the sudden arrival of a social media among people whose spotty educations don’t equip them to usefully handle the avalanches of information rushing their way. Yet their interest is not idle curiosity. A great many have family members — some legal, some illegal — living in states where anti-Latino laws and racists are rife. And they are seeing these rough attitudes being flourished in various ways by the revolving cast of over-excited and verbally undisciplined aspirants battling to become the Republican candidate in the coming general campaign for president. That fosters apprehension here regarding relatives living in such states as Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Nevada, Colorado, and, especially Arizona.

But even the leading GOP aspirants appear oblivious of the blight they are sowing with their open admiration of Arizona Governor Janet Brewer and other political figures well-known for their racist rants. Latino leaders now busy organizing register and get-out-the-vote campaigns point to the dispersion of Latino voters. They are at work in many states not known to be “immigration-portals” or strongholds of progressive fever. Such states, they say, promise to give the 2012 election a new reach and a different “edge” than in the past. Some such groups in the U.S. are calculating that Latino voters will play a crucial role in the vote in nine states besides California and Arizona: Nevada, Indiana, Texas, New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, New York, New Jersey, Illinois.

But that’s in the future. At the moment most new local explorers of U.S. political ways are trying to decipher what Tuesday’s GOP Michigan primary election means.

For Mexicans whose curiosity is prompted by the fate of their north-of-the-border relatives and friends, no good news has resided among the gracelessly revolving corps of GOP would-be candidates. Because there are an estimated 11 million illegal aliens living in the United States, those from Mexico are scattered among the millions of Mexican-Americans — and other Latinos — living in the United States. The racist attitudes strike many U.S. citizens, legal visitors, people who are working and studying legally in the United States. It turns a majority of U.S. citizens with “unusual” names and dark complexions, many of whom were indifferent to politics, into avid, permanent opponents of all those who practice such hostility.

Mitt Romney’s electoral victory in Michigan (his home state) and Arizona primaries does not create the “clarity” that many such observers were hoping for. “He won, didn’t he?” said a friend. “So he’ll run against Obama, no?”

Please login or subscribe to view the complete article.