Originally posted at The Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.
When it emerged that California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman had dismissed her housekeeper of nine years after learning she was in the United States without documentation, "Whither the Latino vote?" quickly became the question of the moment for reporters and pundits following the campaign. In the days before Whitman's shabby sacking of Nicky Diaz came to light, the media touted polls showing that Whitman's unprecedented and expensive ad campaign in Spanish language media was luring Latino voters to the Republican candidate. And before the blitz, conventional wisdom believed Latinos would back Jerry Brown because he was a Democrat, and friends with Cesar Chavez.
This portrayal of nearly 20 percent of the voters in California (and 32 percent of the population) as a horde of easily swayed followers, obscures issues important to Latino voters, and amplifies the misrepresentation of Latinos as marginal actors in civic life, said Lisa Garcia Bedolla, an associate professor at the University of California Berkeley's Graduate School of Education, who has written two books about Latino voting trends in the United States. "The reporting makes it seem as if there's no substantive concerns or policy interests motivating Latino voters," Garcia Bedolla said. Political reporters covering campaigns in the United States need to look at the historical and political forces that shape the perspectives of Latino voters. When they do, Garcia Bedolla, journalists will see that there's no such thing as a monolithic "Latino vote."
Reporters can find a model for more nuanced in journalism in an unlikely source, said Mary Gutierrez, the communications director for SEIU in California, which is strongly backing Brown's gubernatorial bid. Whitman's ads in Spanish language media were all about jobs, education, and the concerns of small business owners, said Gutierrez. The Whitman campaigns understanding that Latino voters are impelled to the polls by more than merely a candidate's stance on immigration, stands in stark contrast to reporting that shows Latinos as single-issue voters. "Jobs and education are the things that people care about," said Gutierrez.
The lead story in Wednesday's New York Times about the likelihood of Latinos voting on November 2 deals almost exclusively with the subject in relationship to immigration, despite a poll after the jump showing that immigration is low on the list of issues motivating Latinos thies election season.
And Latinos don't share one opinion on all topics, said Garcia Bedolla. Views differ as widely as in any other ethnic group. There are Latinos who are unsympathetic to Whitman's ex-housekeeper. What reporters need to do when covering the Latino electorate is to discover what experiences influenced these perspectives. Understanding this variety of experiences, including different paths from Latin America to the United States, will make depictions of Latinos as partial participants in U.S. society. It will unravel the myth that there's a separate economy where Nicky Diaz and millions of other people toil. "The myth feeds into the idea that we can somehow get rid of [Latinos]," said Garcia Bedolla.
It's this cliche of Latinos "living in the shadows" that rankles Katynka Martinez, a communications professor at San Francisco State University. The trope even withstands an onslaught of evidence showing the opposite is true. Martinez points to the students who demonstrated recently for the DREAM Act, and Whitman's housekeeper, who placed herself in the middle of the governor's race. Whitman is not alone in assuming that Nicky Diaz is a pawn of more powerful people with a greater stake in the outcome of the election. For Meg Whitman, it might prove unfortunate that she didn't personally understand that point as clearly as the politicos crafting her Spanish language campaign ads.