Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Do Latino voters really care if the 2020 candidates speak Spanish?

Castro

Doug Mills / The New York Times

presidential candidates Julian Castro and Cory Booker during the first night of the Democratic presidential debates in Miami, June 26, 2019. Only 13 percent of Latinos who are currently registered to vote in the United States speak Spanish as their primary language, according to the Pew Research Center. So, then, who is all this campaign-trail Spanish for?

MIAMI — In his months on the campaign trail, Beto O’Rourke has wanted to make one thing explicitly clear: He is not a pendejo.

Never mind whether anyone in the audience understands the Spanish slang for idiot, it is now a standard part of his stump speech: “We don’t want our kids looking back at us 40 years from now and saying, ‘Who were those pendejos?’”

During the first Democratic presidential debate, O’Rourke eagerly brought his Spanish to prime time.

“Necesitamos incluir cada persona en nuestro democracia,” he said, responding to a question about taxes with a riff on inclusion, roughly translated as: “We must include every person in our democracy.”

Sen. Cory Booker of New jersey jumped in to show that he, too, could communicate in Spanish, which he had picked up mainly from language classes in Mexico and Ecuador. Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has made it known he speaks not just Norwegian, but Spanish as well, conducting bilingual interviews on Telemundo.

Then there is Julián Castro. He ended the debate last week by declaring: “Me llamo Julián Castro, y estoy postulando por presidente de los Estados Unidos.”

With imperfect grammar, Castro reminded Spanish speakers exactly who he is: the grandson of a Mexican immigrant who was raised speaking English in a Latino-majority city.

At campaign events, Castro often leaves out Spanish. His relationship with the language, he has said, is somewhat fraught. He has taken lessons, but he can still appear uncomfortable speaking Spanish in large crowds or off the cuff.

In this way, he’s representative of many Latino voters. Only 13% of Latinos who are currently registered to vote in the United States speak Spanish as their primary language, according to the Pew Research Center.

So, then, who is all this campaign-trail Spanish for?

More than 40 million people in the United States speak Spanish, making it the second-most spoken language in the country behind English. But the history of Spanish in the United States, and who feels comfortable speaking it publicly, is complicated. Castro’s biography illustrates some of the complexity.

As a child, he often accompanied his mother, a prominent Chicana activist, to political meetings and protests. She told him stories of how she had been shamed and forcefully told not to speak Spanish. While he heard the language on television and from his grandparents, he rarely spoke it. When Castro was elected to the San Antonio City Council, he sought out a private tutor.

“There is an irony,” he said in an interview. “There’s a greater expectation, because I’m Latino, of speaking Spanish. Many folks outside of second or third generation Latino communities are not aware of the history of the attempts to eradicate the Spanish language from families.”

Even as the Latino population in the United States continues to grow, and a majority of those who are parents now speak Spanish to their children, Latinos tell pollsters that they don’t view Spanish as essential to the culture.

About 28% say Spanish skills are a requirement for someone who identifies as Latino, according to Pew. A recent poll by UnidosUS, a Latino advocacy group, showed that a candidate’s ability to speak Spanish was last on a list of Latino voters’ priorities, well below “values diversity” and “willing to work with both parties.”

None of that has stopped O’Rourke. Even when it is unclear a crowd has any Spanish speakers, he toggles between English and Spanish.

During a recent trip through South Carolina, O’Rourke displayed his Spanish at nearly every campaign stop, which did resonate with some voters. After a forum in Sumter, where Hispanics make up about 3% of the 40,000 residents, one woman rushed over to thank him. She said he was the first politician she had heard speak Spanish since she immigrated from Mexico nearly 20 years ago.

Though he was born Robert, for most of his life O’Rourke has gone by Beto, a common Spanish nickname for Roberto. He said that when he was growing up in El Paso, his public school offered Spanish lessons a couple of times a week and that he had taken a Spanish literature class as a student at Columbia University. There had been a handful of private lessons when he returned to El Paso and more work on his skills before running for City Council.

“I think Latinos in this country, including those who speak Spanish, have been marginalized and forgotten, if they were ever remembered or known,” he said during an interview. “So I think it’s really important that everyone knows that they’re not just welcome, but that we’re counting on them.”

Both O’Rourke and Castro are Texas natives who have made immigration and their experiences along the Mexican border central aspects of their campaigns. Their relationships with Spanish have also shaped their political identities and the ways they appeal to voters.

O’Rourke can casually speak Spanish in a manner that people at his events find charming. Castro is often under greater scrutiny, frequently asked why he is not fluent. He has also been careful not to portray himself as a candidate who caters to only Hispanic voters.

Buttigieg and Booker sharpened their Spanish skills with local media as mayors and often prepared for interviews by asking staff members to scribble down Spanish translations for words such as “contraception” or “generational change.”

“I find there’s a tremendous amount of appreciation, if you show that you put in the work,” Booker said in an interview. “There’s gratitude and this incredible generosity.”

Native Spanish speakers do, of course, evaluate the candidates’ efforts. After the debates, The Miami Herald assigned a grade to everyone who tried. O’Rourke received the highest: B.

“If you are going to butcher the language, you are better off sticking to English,” said Arturo Vargas, chief executive officer of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. The group hosted a presidential forum in Miami in June in which eight candidates spoke to several hundred people.

Privately, Castro has seethed over the scrutiny of his Spanish. In 2016, he strongly denied a report in The New York Post’s gossip pages that he was “cramming with Rosetta Stone,” while Hillary Clinton was mulling her potential running mate. Ultimately, she chose Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, who is bilingual.

During the 2016 Republican primary campaign, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who are both Cuban American, sparred over who really knew the language. Donald Trump attacked Jeb Bush for using Spanish, echoing an argument made by Tom Tancredo, a Republican who ran for president in 2007. At the time, Tancredo boycotted a Spanish-language debate for Republican presidential candidates, saying it had no place in the presidential race because naturalized citizens must know English.

Spanish is most significant, among the early voting states, in Nevada, where nearly 20% of Democratic caucus attendees in 2016 were Hispanic.

“It’s very different to be able to tell your story without a translator,” said Astrid Silva, an immigration activist in the Las Vegas area. “You’re able to connect.”

Buttigieg said his formal Spanish instruction ended after two years of high school and he is “very far from being fluent.” Still, he has not hesitated to accept invitations to be interviewed in Spanish. “The point is not to impress people, as much as to make people feel included,” he said.

After the debates last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City showed up at the Miami airport to support workers on strike there. Holding a microphone, he enthusiastically shouted one of the best-known sayings in Latin American history: “Hasta la victoria siempre!”

It’s a phrase popularized by Che Guevara, an Argentine guerrilla who helped Fidel Castro lead a communist revolution in Cuba. Hundreds of thousands of people fled the regime, many to South Florida — where few historical figures are more despised than Castro and Guevara.

Responding to the instant backlash, de Blasio issued an apology within hours, saying he did not know the history and only meant the words literally: “Until victory always.”