Dear Presidential Hopefuls: Please Stop Hispandering
Party Trick Spanish has become a baked-in rite of the federal campaign cycle. If only politicians were this committed to keeping immigrant families together.
It began with Beto O’Rourke. Roughly three minutes into the first Democratic debate of the 2020 election, the El Paso, Texas, native — whose birth certificate, lest we forget, reads “Robert” — became the first in a trio of his party’s presidential contenders to dust off his just-fine Spanish for some good old-fashioned Hispandering.
It was an odd moment to make the leap. The question he’d been asked didn’t touch on immigration policy, Hispanic Americans, or even the humanitarian crisis at the southern U.S. border — subjects that might have facilitated some semblance of a transition to a whole new language of address. But no matter. Cory Booker followed suit, answering a question about his hypothetical first day as president in more or less intelligible, study-abroad Castellano. (Julián Castro, who despite his Mexican-American name and heritage has admitted that he barely speaks the language of his grandparents, kept his own performance short.)
Among most Latinx voters, for whom multilingualism isn’t so much a party trick as a mere fact of life, a…
