por Erick Galindo
Hispanic Link News Service
Maybe House Speaker John Boehner didn’t want to cry in front of all those Mexicans.
Perhaps he was concerned about the number of long-form birth certificates he would have to acquire from the members of Congress and wounded solders from the Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital who in years past have been invited, along with Mexico’s Ambassador to the United States, to attend the brief annual Cinco de Mayo celebration in the U.S. capital.
Without any real explanation, Boehner has decided not to host this year’s brief ceremony, a bipartisan tradition that dates back to at least 2003, when Illinois Republican Dennis Hastert was the House Speaker. Education consultant Cecilia Burciaga of Monterey. Calif., wondered out loud to Hispanic Link columnist Andy Porras, “Tell me, why would the Speaker spend so much time in tanning salons to look brown and then cancel ‘Cinco’?”
Through a spokesman, the distinguished Ohio Republican simply decided to let his Latino colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives do it themselves.
¿Sí se puede, qué no?
Boehner’s spokesman Michael Steel offered this official explanation: “We’ve told the Hispanic Caucus that they are welcome to host one this year. The Speaker won’t personally be hosting it, but we are supportive of them having it.”
In Boehner’s defense, Cinco de Mayo does fall on a Thursday, when Congress is eager to finish voting for the week. He would likely have to pay for the party out of his Speaker’s budget. More tears.
Canceling a party for the fastest growing voting bloc in his state and country may sound like a bonehead move. But it’s the type of action one might expect from a fumbling party leader who invariably allows the fringe element of his party to drag him to the far right.
However, if you take into account the GOP’s record with Latinos since our swing vote gave the 2008 election to that “immigrant” Obama, it’s a much scarier picture for youngLatinos like me who will one day inherit the political strata of this country.
The partisan hackery that the Republican senators displayed during the appointment hearings of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is a great example. There, they took a superbly qualified justice and turned her into a stereotype — a loudmouth, know-it-all Latina.
Latinos all over the country said they would “Remember in November,” implying that we Latinos would vote the GOP out of Congress. I’m sure they remembered, although many forgot to vote in the midterm elections.
Look at the much more overt racism being exemplifi ed in the birther phenomenon that is now sweeping the GOP base. The very false implication that President Obama was not born here is a thinly veiled attempt to associate him with the evil Mexicans that want to party in the Capitol and make the poor Speaker cry again.
If you look at the math and the fact that the Latino voting block is becoming more and more powerful, you have to assume that the GOP is too numb or dumb to give us the simplest symbolic gesture that would honor the importance our community has had in the founding and growth of this country.
In the past ten years, fresh Census Bureau data tell us, the Latino population accounted for 65 percent of the population growth in Texas, 55 percent of the growth in Florida and nearly half of the increase in Arizona and Nevada. Those four traditionally Republican states alone are due to add a combined eight congressional seats in the next election.
And all those Latinos will vote this time — most of them for our Barack and in the best interest of Latinos, who are scapegoats when they are not merely inconsequential to the Grand Old’ Party. We’ll be watching to see Boehner’s tears then. For now, I guess we’ll have to settle for Taco Night at the National Press Club.
(Erick Galindo, a former editor with Hispanic Link, is a reporter with the Pasadena Star-News in California. Email him at erick.galindo@sgvn.com)
