ARTICLES
May 2004 ARTICLES
Contents © 2004
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
Latino's Passion
Will Gibson's Movie Help Republicans with Hispanics?
BY JONATHAN FIERRO
To Manny Aldana, it's simple: Latinos are family oriented, mostly Christian, and tend to hold fast to traditional values. Translation: they should all vote for conservative Republicans like him.
And this year, said Aldana, a dark horse candidate running for the 46th assembly district against state assembly speaker Fabian Nuñez (a Democrat), Latino Republicans are getting some much needed help from the most unlikely of quarters: Hollywood.
Well, not exactly.
What Aldana means is that the overwhelming success of Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of Christ, in the Latino community shows that that ethnic group is profoundly religious and is ripe for tackling wedge issues like abortion and homosexual rights. In many ways, Aldana said, the popularity of the movie resonates with the values and sufferings of Latinos.
By contrast, said Aldana, a tall, hulking, 36-year-old Mexican-American shop steward for a local union, mainstream Hollywood, which mostly shunned The Passion, is in bed with the Democratic Party. As he kicks back at an East Los Angeles McDonalds, Aldana added that Latino Democrats mostly hold progressive values that do not mirror those of their constituents. This will not bode well for Democrats during this election year, said Aldana, an Evangelical Christian who was raised in East Los Angeles. He added that Gibson's movie will help candidates like him -- even if that was not Gibson' s intention.
"I think that The Passion is going to play a big role in this election year," said Aldana, who is running for a district that includes East Los Angeles. "Especially among Latinos."
Still, a Republican like Luis Vega, a congressional candidate from Silverlake who will be running against Democratic congressman Xavier Becerra, said that whether The Passion will help Latino Republicans in California remains to be seen. He said he doubts that Republicans will capitalize on the film's success among Latinos but added that spiritual rights should not be excluded as an issue in the election.
Republicans are already fighting an uphill battle due to the backlash they have suffered for the last ten years for having supported anti-immigrant Proposition 187, Vega said. Democrats have done a good job of demonizing Republicans and of setting the issues which are of most benefit to them.
Nevertheless, Aldana said that though Latinos are still angry over alleged Republican anti-immigrant sentiment, they are starting to give the GOP a second look. And the success of The Passion -- though apparently unrelated to political issues -- has shown that for Latinos, religion does matter.
According to the LA Weekly, The Passion has attracted 40 percent of the Latino audience in the cities where the film has been tested. According to exit polls, Latinos are rating the film higher than any other ethnic group, with 76 percent of them saying that they are willing to pay to see the movie again. According to the polls, 86 percent of Latinos say that the film is excellent, while 80 percent say that it is better than what they expected. Ninety-one percent of them say that they would recommend the movie.
Though many Latino priests support the Democratic Party or say that they disliked The Passion, the laity flocked to see the film in droves. Repeatedly. Ruben Bermejo, a Los Angeles Latino activist who has worked with several parishes, told me that though he didn't like The Passion (he thinks that the violence is over the top), the sufferings depicted in the film resonate with most Latinos. He added that the visceral scourging of Jesus depicted in the movie evokes to many Latino immigrants all too real tortures by authorities in their native countries. "Latinos believe in their bloody Christs," Bermejos said, "not in clean cut images of the Christ. They believe in a suffering Christ that suffered just like they do."
For years, Hollywood has tried to court Latinos -- the biggest minority group in the country -- with films like Chasing Papi, which bombed at the box office. And it's been a long time since Selena, based on the life of the slain Tejano singer, was a theatrical smash. So, it's perhaps ironic that a film that Hollywood has snubbed has become such a hit with Latinos.
Will Republicans capitalize (as some have alleged) on the film's popularity? Republicans like Vega and other Latinos say that they don't believe that there are plans for their party to use The Passion as a way of converting more Latinos to their fold. It's simply not real. "It is like Clinton's alleged vast, right-wing conspiracy," Vega said. "Democrats love conspiracies."
But Newsmax, a website that publishes an array of conservative writers, agrees with a recent LA Weekly story by Nikke Finke that says that Republicans plan to create wedge issues among Latinos based on Gibson's film. "So in one fell swoop," says Finke in the Weekly story, "Republicans established a strong bond with the most religious members of those ethnic groups who are supposed to vote Democratic. Just having made such a significant inroad could be enough for conservatives to build on in the future since Latinos are expected to grow to 14 percent of the nation's population in 2010, and half of that population is younger than age 26, and 40 percent is under 18."
Newsmax, which is offering Mel Gibson's book about the movie for just 99 cents upon order of a four-month subscription to the magazine, acknowledged that the Weekly story is right on the money. Newsmax even has the story on its own website. "Amazingly, they got that right," writes Newsmax. "Thanks for the plug."
Unfortunately, said Vega, not the Republican candidate running this fall against Democratic congressman, Xavier Becerra, nor a plug, nor the opinion of Finke about The Passion and Latinos will be enough for Republicans to make major inroads. Vega, who is a Catholic, said that it's going to take much more work, money, and strategy for his party to be able to mount a serious challenge to Democratic dominance among California's urban Latinos.
"A common political strategy is to be able to define your opponent," said Vega recently at a Starbucks in Silverlake. "You always have to be defending yourself."
Vega blames the Latino media for his party's lack of success in the Latino community. He added that Latino reporters are often Democrats themselves or sympathize with them and so do everything in their power to sabotage Latino Republican candidates, or just plainly ignore them. "The Latino media is a branch of the Democratic Party," Vega said.
A glaring example of alleged media bias is the way that Rosario Marin, who last year stepped down as U.S. Treasurer to run for a California federal Senate seat, was treated by the Latino media, said a Los Angeles reporter that asked not to be identified. For years, until she was named treasurer in 2001, the Latino press openly shunned Marin.
Marin, who up until last March was the nation's top Republican Latina, lost against Republican rival Bill Jones, who is expected to lose to Senator Barbara Boxer in November. Marin said that she will work to help get President George W. Bush reelected.
Reverend Martin Garcia, Assemblies of God pastor of Iglesia del Señor (Church of the Lord) in Bell, said that perhaps The Passion may not hold sway politically among Latinos as the recent hype claims. But grassroots efforts like his organization, La Familia Hispana (The Hispanic Family), are working to get Latinos to use their numbers to fight for pro-life causes and against gay marriages.
Garcia -- who formally worked with Lou Sheldon of the national, conservative, faith-based Traditional Values Coalition, which is working to get Latinos to vote Republican -- has joined forces in the past with Catholic groups. Garcia said, during the campaign for Proposition 22 (which defined marriage as a union of a man and a woman), he worked with Catholic bishops, who put up to a million dollars, while Evangelicals provided the manpower to walk precincts.
In addition, Garcia and groups of other Evangelical pastors have been going to Mexico to talk with lawmakers there -- including President Vicente Fox -- to work against measures that would legalize abortion or homosexual marriages. As for many Latino Evangelicals in the U.S., The Passion is resonating with Evangelicals in Mexico.
"We go there to defend family rights and to oppose gay marriages," Garcia said.
Back at the East Los Angeles McDonalds, Aldana showed me some of his mailers for his campaign of two years back. One has the figure of an adult holding a child's hand with a phrase on top: "Coming to a school near you: Homosexual education."
Aldana said that he recognizes that for him to be able to topple someone like Nuñez, he will have to do much more than talk about wedge issues. However, he said, The Passion may be a way for Latino Catholics, Evangelicals, and conservatives from all walks of life to join forces and fight a common foe.
"We have worked together before," Aldana said. " I think we will be seeing more of that in the future."