Donald Trump’s kryptonite: millions of active – and furious – Latino voters

*Wonderful! A call to arms for Latino voters (recent voter registration numbers show we really don’t need one . . .  but still). Share this! VL

---

By Sabrina Vourvoulias, The Guardian (4 minute read)

arely a day goes by when Donald Trump offers Latino something new to get riled up about. In a “Cinco de Mayo” tweet on Thursday, for example, he declared “I love Hispanics!” in the caption to a selfie that showed him digging into a “taco bowl” at his desk.

“This can’t be serious,” said my Mexican cousin. “No words,” wrote a Cuban colleague. “No” and “disgusting” were just some of the other comments my Latino friends – both Democratic and Republican – posted after I uploaded a screen shot of the tweet to my Facebook page.

The presidential candidate started his campaign by saying that Mexicans are rapists and criminals. He then extended his hateful remarks to include those “coming from all over South and Latin America” and the Middle East, vowed to deport all undocumented immigrants and bar all Muslims, and proposes rescinding birthright citizenship and building a great wall between us Mexico. And yet, he is now the presumptive Republican nominee.

Read more NewsTaco stories on Facebook. >> 

In 2012, Latinos voted in record numbers – 71% of us voted for Obama, and 27% of us voted for Romney – but our voter turnout lagged behind other demographics and we constituted only 10% of the electorate. Between then and now, approximately 3.2 million US citizen Latinos have turned voting age. With a big turnout, we have the opportunity to be the electoral demographic that drives Trump out of politics with his tail between his legs and never to return.

Let’s not wait for an invitation, mi gente. Let’s just do it.

READ MORE 

---

---

Sabrina Vourvoulias is an award-winning Latina columnist with work in Philadelphia Magazine, Guardian US, AL DÍA News, Tor.com and Strange Horizons. Her novel, Ink, was named one of Latinidad’s Best Books of 2012. 

[Photo by Elvert Barnes/Flickr]

Suggested reading

Originally published in San Francisco in 1885, The Squatter and the Don is the first fictional narrative written and published in English from the perspective of the conquered Mexican population. Despite being granted the full rights of citizenship under the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, this group had become a subordinated and marginalized national minority by 1860.

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton witnessed the disintegration of the old order, the shifts in power relations and the rapid capitalist development of the California territory, all of which led to the disruption of everyday life for the californios. In The Squatter and the Don, a historical romance, Ruiz de Burton laments land loss and calls for justice and redress of grievances. At a time when the few histories narrated by californios remained in manuscript form in archives, the very act of writing and publishing this novel was a form of empowerment.

The Squatter and the Don questions United States expansionism, as well as the rise of corporate monopolies and their power over government policy, all while successfully utilizing the favored nineteenth-century American literary genre to do so. This novel is a disquieting and challenging literary creation, all seen from the vantage point of very real characters who suffer individually, even while striving to embrace Anglo-American culture and the promises of American democracy.

[cc_product sku=”978-01-55885-185-6″ display=”inline” quantity=”true” price=”true”]