Hispanic Agenda Emerges From Political Conventions

By Tony Castro, Voxxi

The American Hispanic agenda beyond immigration and the Dreamers cause has emerged as a major issue coming out of the conventions — and both parties will have to address it in the final weeks of the presidential campaign.

Employment and underemployment, education, health care, housing and incentives for small businesses are the issues of major importance to American blue collar and middle-class Latinos whose pocketbooks have been hard hit by the recession.

Their importance to Hispanics is often overshadowed by the hue and cry over immigration reform and the plight of the Dreamers, but their significance was driven home at both conventions, especially among Democrats.

When San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, in his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, talked about his family’s struggle to achieve the American Dream, he was describing the travails of second and third generation citizens, who still make up an overwhelming majority of Hispanics in the country.

Like many of the Latinos who spoke at the convention, Castro was a sympathetic voice for immigrants. But the dreams and aspirations he shared—from his daughter’s schooling to the needs of his constituents—were the same you might hear in any non-minority community in the country.

“The Latino community is American,” actress Eva Longoria, one of the president’s leading Hispanic and women’s issues advocates, said in the numerous interviews she gave during the convention. “Its concerns are the same. The economy is the No. 1 issue, second is education, then health care, and immigration falls fourth or fifth.”

Republican Latinos said almost exactly the same thing.

The question in the coming weeks is how both President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney address those issues.

“Middle class Hispanic Americans will be judging them on those issues—quality of life and pocketbook issues,” says California political consultant William Orozco.

That is not to diminish the importance of immigration reform, especially the DREAM Act, say analysts and strategists, most of whom doubt that those will be the issues that will determine how the majority of undecided Latino voters cast their ballots.

For Dolores Mendoza Collier of Ferris, Tex., outside Dallas, the issue that has turned her to Obama is neither immigration nor the DREAMers—nor even Castro’s landmark speech, which moved her to tears.

Her decision, she said, is much more personal: health care and the economy’s impact on her family—as she has children in college and a mortgage on a lovely suburban home.

Mendoza Collier says her vote will swing on what the Republicans deride as Obamacare—the Affordable Health Care Act and the coverage it provides.

“My son’s pre-existing health conditions that he was born with that did not surface until he was in high school has made us more mindful about who is in office,” she says. “Without the insurance plan being the way it is now, his medication would be in the thousands every month.”

And her vote may be a departure from her past voting trend.

“I have voted a straight Republican ticket many times and my husband has always voted straight Republican,” she said. “(But) I will be voting a straight Democratic ticket on election day.”

This article was first published in Voxxi.

Los Angeles-based writer Tony Castro is the author of the critically-acclaimed “Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America” and the best-selling “Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son.”