The Trouble With a Latino Republican Balancing Act

Being a Latino Republican in this electoral cycle filled with anti-immigrant, often interpreted as anti-Latino, sentiment is tough.  Gerry Shih of The Bay Citizen writes about Californian Lieutenant Governor candidate Abel Maldonado and the many difficulties he’s facing this election cycle because the conservative stances he’s taken as a Republican are costing him.

The story is great and worth a read, but here are a few highlights:

• Maldonado was appointed to be Lt. Governor by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last year.
• He’s the highest-ranking Latino official in California history.
• He’s running for re-election against Democrat and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
• He’s campaigned on a Spanish Horatio Alger tale that began in a valley several miles off California’s Central Coast.
• His father, Abel Sr., came to California as a penniless guest worker from Mexico in 1965, and by age 6 he would join his father in the fields after school, picking strawberries.
• A host of Latino organizations and politicians have endorsed Newsom over him because of his hard-line record on farmworker rights and immigration.
• Maldonado showed up unannounced to a Newsom rally in Los Angeles, where Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Dolores Huerta, the co-founder of United Farm Workers of America, pilloried Maldonado while he watched largely in silence from a table in the back. OUCH!
• He he has voted against driver licenses for undocumented immigrants, the federal DREAM Act to allow undocumented immigrants to apply for college financial aid and farming bills that would have, among other things, prohibited employers from giving farm workers weeding tools with short handles.
• He also refused to opposed Prop. 187, which denied undocumented immigrants social services.
• His family farm in Santa Maria, Calif. covers 6,000 acres, employs 250 and has incurred dozens of workplace violations.
• In 2007, a Mexican farmhand died when a tractor that was operating without a spotter ran him over.

The article does a good job of pointing out how catering to conservative politics has worked well for Maldonado in the past, but in the current political climate, his old tricks just aren’t working for him. Give it a read.