Latino Politics Is Not Separate From American Politics

First things first: Latino politics is American politics. It isn’t a particular flavor of American politics, a separate segment of American politics or a special interest of American politics. It is integral to the whole and anyone who diminishes it diminishes it all.

That said, there are three areas of American politics where Latinos are at the forefront, challenging definitions and expanding the understanding of what all Americans have in common.

It sounds serious, but it’s really very simple: the economy (and along with it – job creation), education, health, foreign policy, taxes, marriage and family issues, gender issues, immigration, and on and on, are issues that affect all Americans. It’s why we argue about them so much (and that implies the fact that we are free to argue; an American trait that we all have in common). So fixing the economy and reforming education won’t distinguish one group of Americans from another – although the particular way they’re done may benefit some more than others, and that’s an equality and fairness issue, quintessentially American (or so we say).

If anything, Latinos are pushing the American cultural envelope. We’re redefining America in the way the Europeans and the Asians and the Africans did and continue to do. We all know and accept the specifics; salsa outsells ketchup, Spanish media outpaces English media in many places, the Latino work ethic has become a part of the American lore (that’s been a major change in my eyes; the fact that Latinos are no longer spoken of as lazy, but as a hard working, can-do work force).

The places where Latino politics finds it’s particular exceptions are the DREAM Act, language issues and voting rights. By exceptions I mean that these issues affect Latinos in a particularly specific way that doesn’t affect the larger American mass. There is issue seepage; language and voting rights concerns are shared by all immigrants and voting segments, but Latinos are the Americans that, by their sheer number, carry the burden of forcing change.

• The DREAM Act is both politics and definition. The DREAMers are for every practical purpose American, but for political purposes they lack legitimacy, a piece of paper that certifies their practical status. It’s a particularly Latino issue because of most of the thousands of DREAMers are Latino.  The de facto standard-bearer for the DREAMers is Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, who despite his Latino name is  actually Filipino (the history of the Spanish influence and domination of the Philippines is not lost on me, I merely make a simple and obvious point). Passage of the DREAM Act, despite it’s being used as a political wedge where those who were once for it are now against it, will have a dramatic effect on the American Latino community.

• Latinos are smack-dab in the middle of the voting rights issues. Voter ID and redistricting affect other groups, to be sure, but because of the unprecedented growth of the Latino community U.S. Latinos are leading the battles on these fronts.  And it’s a seemingly disjointed battle. Instead of one national push there are, especially in the case of redistricting and voter ID, a series of state level skirmishes that are being confronted in a piecemeal manner.

• Language issues have one lightning rod target: English only. This one also operates at the national and state level, where bills are suggested, taunted and filed that would make English the official language of the Untied States to the exclusion of all other languages. Spanish speakers would be the most affected although there are literally hundreds of languages spoken in the United States and all the people who speak them would feel the effects of language exclusion. This issue speaks directly to our nation’s immigrant past and the myth of newcomers to our country of decades past who learned English and assimilated into the American culture. But I would wager that those immigrants of the past never stopped speaking their native languages. They learned English, yes, as Latino immigrants do. But they spoke their acquired language with accents and felt more comfortable in their familiar way of speaking and reading and communicating with each other. Latinos are no different; language integration takes on average two generations.

So is there a specific Latino politics? There is American politics, with Latino interests. But if I were to define specific Latino politics, at this moment in American political time, I’d use the DREAM Act, voting rights and language issues in the definition.

We’ll talk again in ten years or so, everything may change by then.

Follow Victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda

[Photo by joewcampbell]