Democrats Don’t Deserve Latino Votes Just Because They’re the Less Racist Party

Politics is transactional. What were the Dems really offering Latinos?

Maria Hinojosa
GEN

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Latina women rally to get out the vote in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photo: The Washington Post/Getty Images

The day after the election, I woke up at 4 a.m. to do my first live shot on TV. I had this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and a deep sense of dread. The media pollsters had overhyped a blue wave that never arrived and the Democrats had failed to learn a key lesson about Latino and Latina voters once again.

I spent the day appearing on multiple media platforms, explaining what it means to be Mexican from Chicago, which is different from being a Cuban in Florida who has fled a repressive regime and different from being a Tejano rancher on the U.S.-Mexico border and different from being a second-generation Salvadoran American businessman from San Francisco. For years we’ve been made to feel invisible, and now suddenly people are talking about us and over us, simplifying us into a box. But Latina journalists like me have been trying to tell this story for decades. Nobody listened.

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Maria Hinojosa
GEN
Writer for

Founder and President of Futuro Media Group and author of Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America.