HispanicTrending

What makes the Hispanic market buy?

February 29, 2008
By MAURA POSSLEY

Understanding what makes a consumer tick is the key to a good advertisement, but companies often don't have a clue when it comes to the nation's fastest growing minority market.

To give businesses knowledge about the Hispanic market, the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agen- cies has launched a Latino Cultural Identity Study.

The study aims to dig deep into what drives Hispanic consumers, helping businesses effectively reach that segment of the marketplace, said Jose Lopez-Varela, chair-elect of the Virginia-based organ- ization.

"In the past, it's all sort of been defined by language," said Lopez-Varela, chief executive officer of the Coral Gables advertising company ADN Communications. "Language is just one aspect of being a Latino."

A 2005 study by the association of the nation's top advertisers found that while spending on Hispanic print and television advertising grew 4.7 percent from 2003 to 2004, the amount allocated for Hispanic media compared to total advertising budgets dropped nearly 1 percent for that same period.

On the Gulf Coast, businesses have reacted to the growing market but have yet fully invested in Spanish-language media or English advertising targeted at Hispanic consumers, said Pedro Perez, of the Sarasota-based Nuevo Advertising.

"Everybody is dabbling in it but no one is doing it well," he said. "They're looking for guidance."

The study will look at four pillars that the association said defines cultural identity: interpersonal orientation, time and space perception, spirituality and gender perception.

The project begins with focus groups to allow "a Latino to decide what makes a Latino," Lopez-Varela said.

The study seeks to present a uniform look at the Hispanic market and advertising industry, according to the association.

But distinguishing differences between the Spanish-speaking countries is necessary, said Elizabeth Cuevas-Neunder, president of the Puerto Rican Chamber of Commerce of Sarasota-Manatee counties.

"They cannot market the same to Puerto Ricans as they would to Mexicans," she said. "We are a great source of purchasing power, but we all have different behaviors."

Businesses have begun to seek exposure by climbing aboard Latin chambers, said Manuel Chepote, president of the Gulf Coast Latin Chamber of Commerce.

The opportunity to engage the local Hispanic market is everywhere, Chepote said, everything from faith-based festivals to soccer games.

Source: Bradenton Herald

Latina blogger sees world of change

February 29, 2008
By Marisa Treviño

Since 2004, I have been offering online analysis on politics and issues that uniquely affect the Latino community. Now, for the first time, Hispanic bloggers like me are being ushered into the world of presidential politics — and given a front-row seat.

With the race for the White House narrowing and the Latino vote finally realizing its potential, Latino political bloggers have suddenly been flushed from the fringes of the blogosphere while being courted by the campaigns.

 

In Tuesday's primary in Texas, Hispanic voters are expected to account for almost 40% of the turnout, easily enough to swing the contest one way or another. The presidential campaigns believe we bloggers can help sway Latino opinion, accurately interpret the pulse of the community and even give the campaigns a sense of how the electorate will vote.

Traffic on my blog, though quite modest when compared with mainstream blogs such as The Huffington Post, has ramped up since the campaign began — a reflection of the historic interest in a contest that has also seen record voter turnout in primaries and caucuses. A good month for my site used to mean tens of thousands of hits; now it's in the hundreds of thousands.

My blog is but one of a handful that reflect the political potential of Hispanics as swing voters in this election. As I've said on my site, "The global conversation is not complete without our voices." Whether in rallies across the country or in voices on my blog, Latinos are becoming a force in the national discourse.

The first candidate I saw reach out to Hispanic bloggers was New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who began holding "blogger briefings" not long after he announced his candidacy. I then contacted all the campaigns and asked to be included on their press lists. In addition to news releases, the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney stayed in weekly contact with me, including quick replies to my e-mails. Clinton's Hispanic outreach coordinator then, Fabiola Rodriguez-Ciampoli, treated me like any mainstream media reporter, even giving me her cellphone number.

When I requested a "guest" blog entry from all the candidates, Clinton, Mike Gravel, Chris Dodd, Romney and Barack Obama submitted one. Neither John McCain nor Mike Huckabee responded.

Latino bloggers might or might not be able to influence the Latino vote. That's not the point. What is important is that our voices — and indeed, the voices of the Latino electorate — are finally being heard in the corridors of power and in the mainstream media.

That's not just good news for Hispanics. That's good news for the country.

Source: USA Today via Yahoo! News

Latinos hit hard by mortgage crisis

February 29, 2008 03:41:32 AM
By EUNICE MOSCOSO

The Latino community has been hit hard by the subprime mortgage crisis and the situation could get worse, the president of a Latino civil rights group told Congress on Thursday.

Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, told a key House panel that Latinos are vulnerable to abuse in the housing market because of many factors, including a lack of banking and credit history, and often are steered into high-risk loans even when they qualify for better rates.

About one in 12 mortgages to Latinos in 2005 and 2006 will end up in foreclosure, she said, citing a report by the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group.

The Northern San Joaquin Valley has been ground zero for foreclosures. Stanislaus, Merced and San Joaquin counties are at the top of the list of areas with the most foreclosures in the country.

Experts attribute this in part to the high percentage of subprime loans that were made in the valley. One study put that figure at more than 46 percent. It also found that more than 60 percent of Latino home buyers in the valley received subprime and other high-cost mortgages.

"NCLR is deeply concerned that a generation of Latino wealth is under attack," Murguia told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services.

Nearly half of Latinos are homeowners

Latinos have made strides in homeownership in recent years, from 42 percent in 1995 to nearly half in 2005, but those loans were often at higher rates.

Murguia said Latinos were 30 percent more likely than whites to receive a high-cost mortgage and twice as likely to receive an "option-adjustable rate mortgage" known as an ARM.

The latter has been used in predatory lending in which the homeowners begin with a low monthly payment and are unknowingly adding a balance to their mortgage each month. Eventually, the payment increases significantly, which is known as a "reset," and many homeowners can't afford to pay.

Because of upcoming resets, the peak of foreclosures for Latino households will be in 2009 and 2010, Murguia said.

She urged lawmakers to take action because "we know this is on the horizon," she said.

Murguia recommended creating a community-based financial counseling network to help consumers manage their finances and learn how to avoid unmanageable debt.

In addition, she said, federal agencies, credit card companies and local consumer protection agencies should partner with community-based organizations to raise awareness of financial scams.

Donna Gambrell, director of the Commu-nity Development Financial Institutions Fund at the Treasury Department, also testified before the panel.

1.8 million mortgages will reset

She said that 1.8 million ARM mortgages are scheduled to reset in 2008 and 2009 and her agency is trying to get ahead of the problem.

Gambrell touted the HOPE NOW Alliance, a partnership between the government, mortgage lenders and nonprofit counselors, to help consumers avoid foreclosure.

The effort, started in October, has sent 1 million letters to at-risk homeowners offering help, and a nationwide foreclosure prevention hot line, 888-995-4763, receives 4,500 calls a day.

"Homeowners must take responsibility and respond to this outreach," she said. "Struggling homeowners must actively engage with their lenders and demonstrate that they want to keep their homes in order for our initiatives to be effective."

Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., chairman of the subcommittee, asked the witnesses whether the government should have seen the mortgage crisis coming.

Lydia Parnes, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, said that it was a "hard issue."

"We saw specific issues with specific companies. We did not see a prevalent practice across the industry that would have flagged this," she said. "It was hard to crystal-ball that."

Source: The Modesto Bee

Ex-nun & baker battle for Latino rights

February 29, 2008
By Clem Richardson

Angel Mendoza, 2, is flanked by former nun Leticia Alanis (l.) and mom, Elizabeth Mendoza.

One was a nun back home, when home was Mexico. The other ran a small bakery.

Fate drew both to Brooklyn, where they found themselves dealing with the issues that seem to plague immigrant communities the world over - poor housing, low wages and ripoff employment schemes.

Which is how the former nun, Leticia Alanis, and the former baker, Elizabeth Mendoza, joined Artemio Guerra and Gerardo Cacique at the head of La Union De La Comunidad Latina, a Sunset Park, Brooklyn, nonprofit dedicated to promoting economic and social justice for new Latino immigrants in that community.

La Union helped organize supermarket workers in Sunset Park, some of whom were being locked in stores overnight while they restocked shelves and cleaned up.

"This was a very dangerous practice. They were not allowed to use the telephone, which was disconnected," Alanis said. "If there was a fire, there was no way they could get help."

Working with a legal services group, La Union was able to end that practice, Alanis said.

La Union has hosted protest marches in support of immigration issues, and sponsors English as a Second Language and citizenship classes.

The group joined with the Oakland, Calif.-based Transnational Institute for Grassroots Research and Action (La Tigra) in a national survey of how remittance agency practices affect its members. Remittance agencies charge fees to wire money between countries.

Those survey results will be announced in May.

La Union has worked with several other organizations, including Make The Road New York, the American Lung Association of the City of New York and the Urban Justice Center, as a member of the Coalition for Asthma Free Homes.

As part of La Union's Healthy Home Campaign, it has joined the Coalition in pushing the city Health Department and the city Housing Preservation Department to change how landlords clean up mold and attack rodent infestations.

A La Union survey found that at least one person in a third of the homes contacted in Sunset Park suffered from some asthma-related ailment.

"We want HPD to make yearly inspections of those buildings where mold, mice and roaches have been a problem," Alanis said.

In May, representatives from La Union, including Alanis, will head to Mexico City to take part in a four-day conference on issues affecting transnational women.

Alanis, 47, had been a nun for 20 years, living in Monterrey, Mexico, when, 11 years ago, she decided she was ready to "discontinue that type of life."

A sister who had immigrated to New York City invited her to visit, so she did.

"I liked it, so I stayed," she said.

After graduating from City College's Center for Worker Education, Alanis was intent on going into social work. Instead, she found herself volunteering and venturing into community organizing.

"I believe in collective power and collective empowerment," she said.

Alanis volunteered with several organizing agencies, including Make The Road By Walking, before she discovered Fifth Avenue Committee, which led her to other La Union founders.

The group is now three years old.

Mendoza, 33, ran a bakery in Puebla, Mexico. She immigrated here four years ago looking for a better life. She joined La Union in 2005 after she went to the group looking for help with dreadful conditions in her apartment, which were triggering daughter Adrina's asthma.

"We had mold, rats, bad plumbing and the windows were sagging," Mendoza said. "There was lead paint also.

"I came for help, but when I saw what La Union was about, I got involved," Mendoza said in Spanish as Alanis interpreted.

It was Mendoza's first foray into any kind of activism.

But Mendoza saw that housing problems that tenants experienced "were part of the discrimination against Latino people. I also saw we had the right to ask for our rights to be respected."

She also has learned a lot about herself. "I did not know there were so many people feeling the same things I did," said Mendoza, who also has a 2-year-old son, Angel.

Though most members are Mexican, La Union draws from many Latin American countries, including Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, Alanis said.

LA UNION maintains space in Trinity Lutheran Church at the corner of Fourth Ave. and 46th St. in Sunset Park, a neighborhood that is home to the largest Mexican population in the borough.

"I love this work," Alanis said. " I believe in the work we are doing, so I want to use all my talents in service to the community."

Source: New York Daily News

Universal wins Univision auction

February 29, 2008
By Joshua Chaffin

Universal Music has won the auction for Univision Music, the leading Spanish-language record company in the US.

The size of the deal was not disclosed, although a person familiar with the discussions said that Universal paid about $100m.

Univision, which dominates Spanish-language television in the US, founded its record division in 2001. It put it on the market after going private in a $12.3bn buy-out two years ago. Univision Music drew interest from record companies eager to tap into the US Hispanic market. Some executives also found it appealing because Spanish-language music suffers less illegal filesharing than other genres.

Source: Financial Times

Latinos Find Home in Southwest Detroit

Februay 28, 2008
By COREY WILLIAMS

The broad-brimmed western hats, colorful festival dance dresses and Mayan-style pottery that line the shelves at Xochi's Mexican Imports are common sites at stores in the Southwest.

But it's southwest Detroit on a cold, dreary winter day, not sunny El Paso, San Diego, Tucson or other cities just north of the Mexican border.

From its Mexican Town restaurant district to the new shops of the La Plaza Mercado retail development, southwest Detroit is doing something it hasn't done in years — grow and prosper.

"We come starving for a better life," 32-year-old dance instructor Valeria Montes said. "We want to strive and we've found in southwest Detroit a place to do it. The opportunity was here for us and we took it."

Latinos are carving out a niche in neighborhoods far from the southern border more and more — from Bagley Street here to the Mitchell Street area in Milwaukee to Bailey's Crossroads in Fairfax County, Va.

A new wave of Latino immigrants is following others who established communities in northern cities in the 1950s after getting jobs in the auto and other manufacturing industries. The attraction now is employment in restaurants, shops and other service-oriented businesses that cater primarily to residents in those communities but also draw non-Latinos.

"A number of folks who are coming up — documented or undocumented — are finding jobs," said Enrique Figueroa, director of the Roberto Hernandez Center at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The now-vibrant neighborhood wasn't always so.

Its fate had mirrored most other areas of Detroit that began to lose businesses and people following the city's 1967 riot. Boarded-up buildings and an unappealing mix of fast-food stops, dank bars and seedy strip clubs lined the streets.

Gang violence was rampant and the housing stock crumbled.

"It wasn't a neighborhood where you could walk down the street," Southwest Detroit Business Association deputy director Edith J. Castillo said. "Now, you can actually walk down West Vernor. You can take your family out for ice cream after church."

Castillo's nonprofit is one of several working with city officials and businesses to resurrect the area.

More than $200 million has been invested in southwest Detroit in the past 15 years, which has attracted retail and new homes, including an $11 million condo development.

"It's one of the few places in the city where you are seeing a lot of private investment," said Olga Savic, of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., the city's public/private development arm. "West Vernor Avenue was once primarily vacant. Now, it's 90 percent full."

The neighborhood is doing so well the mayor didn't include it in his plan to pump millions of dollars into distressed areas.

Blight hasn't been totally wiped out, but older Latinos and the new immigrants are helping with the transformation.

"These are people who are risk takers ... and understand if they are going to make it, it's up to them to make it successful," said Ruben Martinez, director of the Julian Samora Research Institute at Michigan State University. "Many others, who have been here for several generations, don't have that."

The Detroit neighborhood is known as "Mexican Town," but it truly is a melting pot.

About half the residents claim a Hispanic heritage, 25 percent are black, 20 percent are white and 5 percent are Arab-American, according to the Southwest Detroit Business Association.

In contrast, more than 80 percent of Detroit's 920,000 residents are black.

And while the city's overall population has plummeted in recent decades because of white flight and more recently the exodus of the black middle class, the southwest side's population has grown considerably, up 6.9 percent to more than 96,000 people from 1990 to 2000.

The city's Latino population grew by nearly 19,000 over that period to more than 47,000.

Without the manufacturing jobs that attracted many to places like Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, Latinos have found opportunities in their own backyards, Figueroa said.

"Once you had a cousin, uncle or aunt there, that was a logical place to come because there were still jobs," he said. "The Detroit economy and Milwaukee economy have not done so well in the '80s and '90s. But what has occurred in the Latino community is the establishment of new businesses, primarily service-oriented businesses that serve the Latino communities that were established in the '50s and '60s."

Mexican restaurants and bars along Mitchell Street and in other parts of Milwaukee attract non-Latinos, but it's Latinos that keep the bakeries and grocery stores open, Figueroa said.

"There is enough money in the economy that people can sustain retail establishments by primarily relying on Latino clientele," he said.

It's that sense of community that led Montes and her husband to move from a downriver suburb of Detroit to the southwest side.

"I feel like I'm at home," she said. "I go to get a haircut, I speak Spanish. I go to mercado (market), I speak Spanish. My daughter goes to school and there are a lot of Latino kids. It's a great feeling."

Via AP

Hard times for Latino construction

February 27, 2008
By Dan Grech

Construction went from being a leading contributor to employment growth to a leading source of unemployment. Dan Grech reports from a community near Miami that the Latino population has suffers a particular loss.

Doug Krizner: Later this morning, we'll get the numbers on new home sales for January. It's likely we'll see more evidence of a building industry still in the dumps.

Just a year ago, this business was a goldmine, especially for Latino construction workers. Two out of every three new construction jobs were filled by Hispanics. Cities like Las Vegas, Phoenix and Miami became meccas for tens of thousands of recently arrived immigrants. So how are they biding their time these days? From the Americas Desk at WLRN in Miami, we sent Marketplace's Dan Grech to find out.

Dan Grech: At its height, the construction industry employed 1 in 4 Hispanic workers. That's 3 million people with well-paying jobs -- 3 million families that could, for perhaps the first time, aspire to some middle-class comforts. What a difference a year makes.

Rakesh Kochhar is a researcher with the Pew Hispanic Center:

Rakesh Kochhar: The construction sector went from being a leading contributor to employment growth to a leading source of unemployment. Whatever gains they had appear to have been wiped away in the space of this past year.

Homestead is a sprawling bedroom community near Miami. When the economy was healthy, Homestead was the fastest growing city of its size in the nation, and a magnet for Hispanic laborers. Now, it's a way station for ex-construction workers like Tomas Diaz.

Diaz laid floors and built roofs for $14 an hour -- enough to get married and start a family. Now, he now cuts lawns for $8 an hour.

    Diaz (voice of interpreter): I don't know what to do with all these bills that keep coming month after month. You start to think, do I pay this bill, or do I buy food?

Many ex-construction workers in Homestead have turned to farm work. Others are day laborers or landscapers.

Hector Sales manages a run-down apartment building on the edge of town. He spent a recent morning trying to salvage some old electric coil ovens. The building once teemed with workers. Now, it's almost empty.

Jonathan Fried runs We Count!, a Homestead community organization:

    Jonathan Fried: People need to move to survive. And if they don't find work here, they're gonna move elsewhere.

Pew's Rakesh Kochhar says some Hispanics are getting a new start.

    Kochhar: One small surprise is the growth of Hispanic employment in education and health services -- more white-collar work.

Kochhar says Hispanics often work the lowest paying jobs in those industries. Still, there are opportunities to move up.

Source: American Public Media's Market Place

Study finds minorities paid more for loans

February 28, 2008
By Binyamin Appelbaum 

An annual report on mortgage lending in Massachusetts finds that black and Latino borrowers were disproportionately the recipients of loans with high interest rates in 2006. Perhaps the more interesting question is what the 2007 report will show.

The lending industry has changed dramatically since 2006. Lending at high interest rates has all but dried up. The five companies that made the most subprime, or high-rate, loans in Massachusetts in 2006 all have suspended lending, including New Century Financial Corp. and Fremont Investment & Loan.

The question is whether other institutions are now making loans to people formerly served by the subprime industry, or whether some neighborhoods risk a return to the underserved days of redlining.

"We're hoping that some of the responsible lenders step forward and replace them in an aggressive way," said Tom Callahan, a board member of the Massachusetts Community & Banking Council, which issued the report. "All banks - big, medium, and small - should be really licking their chops here."

The report does not just underscore the racial pattern of high-rate mortgage lending. It also underscores just how pervasive subprime lending became.

One in every five home-purchase loans in Massachusetts in 2006 carried a high interest rate. And, the report found at least one high-rate loan was made in every community in Massachusetts.

This is the 14th annual report for the council authored by Jim Campen, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. It is titled "Changing Patterns," but it reports very little change: Blacks, and to a lesser extent Latinos, remained largely unable in 2006 to borrow money at the same interest rate as whites.

Just 26 percent of black applicants for a home-purchase loan got an interest rate near the market average. About a quarter were rejected and the rest got loans with high interest rates. By contrast, 64 percent of white applicants got loans with market rates.

The report found that companies specializing in lending at high interest rates continued to concentrate their lending in minority neighborhoods.

And it found fresh evidence of a particularly striking pattern: The study reports that 53 percent of black borrowers in the Boston area making at least $98,000 a year got mortgage loans with high interest rates, compared with 13 percent of white borrowers.

A high interest rate is defined as a rate about two percentage points, or more, above the prevailing market rate.

The study estimates that the average recipient of a high-rate loan actually was four percentage points above the market rate - an average rate of 10.44 percent compared to an average market rate of 6.5 percent. On a $325,000 loan, that's a difference of about $900 a month.

Campen's study is based on data that lenders report to the federal government under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. The federal government releases raw data for the previous year in late summer. Data for 2007 will be released later this year.

The federal data do not include significant information about a borrower's financial circumstances, such as savings, debts, and credit history. The lending industry argues that makes it impossible to conclude that disparities are the result of discrimination by lenders, rather than economic circumstances. Major industry trade groups oppose reporting that data, calling it an unnecessary burden.

Kathy Schreck, a past chair of the Massachusetts Mortgage Bankers Association and a board member of the council that issued the report, said she supported further inquiry.

"It's very important for lenders and for regulators to look at the trends and see why minorities are getting higher-priced loans," said Schreck, also a regional sales manager for Mortgage Network Inc., one of the largest mortgage lenders based in Massachusetts. "I want to know why."

Source: The Boston Globe

Four plays examine Latino identity

February 27, 2008
By Jennifer Holder

Welcoming the audience at the Political Theatre Festival, Teatro del Pueblo artistic director Alberto Justiniano invited us to “embark on a journey of exploration.” He also encouraged each person to open his or her mind and appreciate other perspectives. What followed in Series B of the Festival were four short plays, each one conveying a unique perspective on Latino history, culture and identity.

In Kimberly del Busto’s Hurricane in a Glass, a daughter and granddaughter are brought together as they make a difficult decision regarding their grandmother’s—their abuela‘s—long-term care. Deciding to move Abuela to a nursing home was relatively straightforward. More troubling for the three generations of Cuban-American women, however, was the matter of preserving their cultural heritage. They ponder whether they can “remember to forget, or forget to remember?”

The second in the series, The Great All-Dominican Championship Playoff Game by Robin Rice Lichtig, dramatizes “the true story of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and his exploitation of a national obsession and young baseball rookie Satchel Paige,” as the program puts it. Racism in the U.S. forced Paige into an equally racist but more economically beneficial situation in the Dominican Republic, where his life ultimately depended on winning a baseball game.

In Eric Silva Brenneman’s Variations on Mixed Generations, three second-generation American Latinos are faced with difficult questions of idenity when they meet for lunch. The scene is replayed over and over, and each time their reactions are different—ranging from shock to indignation.

The last play, Mucho Latino by Dominic Orlando, uses the format of an interactive game show format to examine the concept of Latino stereotypes. However, as the audience was invited into the performance, the subject expanded to a conversation about the larger issue of identity. The audience was at first reluctant to participate—perhaps not realizing that their input was expected—but eventually there was a lively discussion on the overarching theme of personal identity.

The Political Theater Festival, as described in the program, is a place “where theatre becomes the cornerstone for social and political discourse on issues directly affecting Latin America.” The plays in Series B presented provocative situations. There were no solutions offered. We in the audience were left to provide our own answers, to ask additional questions, and to have our own political debate.

Source: Twin Cities Daily Planet

Do Latinos owe African Americans a political debt?

February 27, 2008
By Alan A. Aja

Next Tuesday and primaries to come, all signs point to the crucial role Latinos will playing in determining not only the democratic presidential nominee, but also the overall election. According to already-held primaries, polls and growing anecdotal evidence, African Americans are overwhelmingly displaying their affinity toward Barack Obama, and they aren't likely to change their minds should he win the nomination. However, the question for Latinos remains in doubt, shedding little evidence of a black-Latino coalition. Save for Obama's juridical state of Illinois, in other states with sizable Latino populations like California, Nevada, and New York, Senator Clinton received more Latino votes. In the upcoming primaries in Ohio and Pennsylvania, especially Texas, the group has been deemed as "make or break" voters for the Obama movement.

From past elections to today's primaries, many have offered theories as to what explains this inter-group paradox. Why is it that two minority groups, they have asked, with sometimes shared histories of marginality and political disenfranchisement, linked together by the indelible mark of color, often refuse to join forces to elect a candidate that may best represent their needs and concerns? The answer, some have said, is that U.S. minority groups are not all-together monolithic communities, making political "turf" choices based on issues that may not be as important to the other. Even within groups, internal divisions by region, class, skin shade or country of origin have profound political impacts. Take the case of the predominantly white Cuban-American community in South Florida, which although ideologically changing, continues to lean Republican amidst a nation of primarily democratic Latinos. On the contrary, there are over 1 million black Latinos (or more!) in the U.S., with most on the east coast pledging allegiances to the Democratic Party.

While the above theory raises important issues, it only begins to scratch the surface as to what is really happening when Latinos go into the voting booth. In a Feb. 12 CBS news article, Clinton pollster and Latino expert Sergio Bendixen was quoted, "the Hispanic voter—and I want to say this very carefully, has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates." A few days earlier in an Feb. 8 New York Daily News piece, controversial Latino radio host Luis Jimenez had already echoed these sentiments, but supplied a rationale that, "the fear that with a black president, "they're" really going to be in and "we're" going to be out." Tie these perspectives in with former President Clinton's claim that even Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, and given the knowledge of the burgeoning Latino vote, the expectation for the Hillary camp (and no doubt McCain's!): don't fear Obama's oratorical cadence to transcend social divisions, Latinos just won't vote for a man they perceive as black!

To explain this well known but often "unspoken divide," historians are quick to point to a legacy of U.S. racial apartheid that pitted groups against each other to sustain white power. However, many Latinos are also products of a pervasive caste system implemented during the era of Spanish colonialism whereas the lighter the skin shade meant improved access to the upper strata of society. Consciously or subconsciously, immigrants transfer the legacy of this caste system inside US boundaries only to exacerbate an already established system of group apartheid. Translate the above into the inter-group differences playing out in this election, and the question should not have been if Obama is "black enough" to garner support from African Americans, but compared to his current and potential future opponent, is he "white enough" to accumulate the same from Latinos?

While the question of race is no doubt playing a role in this election, news media have quoted both African American and Latina women suggesting that their identity as women comes first; their race or ethnicity second. This is a valid argument, as bridging the gender divide is past due. Also, Hillary's extensive experience, along with the perception of an improved economy under her husband's regime, allows Latinos to feel like they get two for the vote of one. While the argument that experience is key to an effective administration is disputable (never mind that George W. Bush was once governor of Texas and will leave with a tainted legacy), as is that most Latinos benefited economically from a Clinton presidency (do we forget the vast adverse economic consequences of NAFTA or Welfare Reform on our communities?), we also forget Senator Clinton's vote for an illegal invasion of Iraq, which only put poor people of color on the front lines to battle it out with other poor people of color.

It is true that no group should choose a candidate based strictly on their shared racial, ethnic or religious background. This obviously deduces people to vote away from the content of character that Dr. King eloquently called us to do. However, African Americans have realized the significance of someone who shares their ancestry, understands the societal costs of skin color, and pushes a progressive, color-sighted agenda which can only help create conditions in the white house that is tolerant and inclusive to the needs of all people. Before turning to politics, Obama worked with churches as a community organizer, and as a human rights lawyer. He has vehemently opposed NAFTA and refuses to scapegoat many of our undocumented sisters and brothers for America's growing economic problems. As the son of an African immigrant, Obama can relate to what it is like to be an immigrant of color, at the same time his grassroots work experiences allow him to understand the problems that have plagued members of our communities for centuries. This is something that Senator Clinton, or McCain for the matter, will never be able to understand due to their perched positions of privilege.

On Tuesday and beyond, perhaps it's time for Latinos, especially those who immigrated post-1965, to pay African Americans somewhat of a political debt. In fact, if it wasn't for an African American-initiated Civil Rights Movement, which led to a ripe political climate to change our racist immigration laws in the first place, many of us would not even be here to cast votes! The social price they paid, by blood and tears, helped inspire other groups to march for the rights to which many of us benefit; civil, voting, employment and housing, as well as a vastly improved climate of social tolerance, not to mention the birth of affirmative action of which many of us have benefited. The time is now to join our African American brothers and sisters, move beyond the value of class or skin color, and support the choice they have overwhelmingly made: Barack Obama.

Alan A. Aja is a Professor of Puerto Rican & Latino Studies at Brooklyn College-City University of New York. He is a former labor organizer for CWA-Texas State Employees Union in Austin and El Paso and has conducted human and environmental rights work throughout Latin America & the Caribbean. Aja was born to Cuban parents.

Source: Austin American-Statesman