In just over thirty weeks, Americans will elect the 45th President of the United States. The campaign trail is contentious and many of the issues the candidates are debating pertain to Latinas/os and Chicanas/os, a coveted demographic for both Republicans and Democrats. Against a backdrop of deportations and voter suppression targeting Latinos, a new edited volume, A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History, presents the optimistic voices of scholars who call for sophisticated solutions while embracing transnationalism and the reality of multiple,
overlapping identities. Although the political landscape is fraught with closed-off rhetoric, A Promising Problem encourages diversity of thought and opens the possibilities of historical imagination. We asked a few contributors to the book to comment on how their research has informed their views on the 2016 presidential election, providing new perspectives on America’s culture wars.
The Chicana/o and Latina/o vote is much debated this presidential election year. Does the history you uncover point to new realities or future directions for Chicana/o or Latina/o communities that are of importance for the 2016 election cycle?
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Carlos Kevin Blanton, March 7th
Having just watched one “Super” Tuesday in early March with additional such Tuesdays to go as well as some scattered “Super” Saturdays and Sundays thrown in for good measure, I am struck at what a contradictory role Chicanas/os and Latinas/os play in this 2016 presidential election. Chicanas/os and Latinas/os are simultaneously celebrated and vilified, normalized and exoticized, and reflect both “promise” and “problem.”
As I write this, Cuban Americans named Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio remain credible Republican candidates running for President; another Republican candidate, Donald Trump, has jingoistically called for harsh deportations against Mexican immigrants as well as the construction of a massive wall on the U.S.-Mexico border for which he intends to force Mexico to pay, a claim former President of Mexico Vicente Fox has pugnaciously repudiated; and two Democratic presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, are vying for the support of Latina/o voters in states all over the country as a key demographic group for the success of their party. “Problem” and “Promise,” it seems, define this 2016 election cycle for Chicana/o and Latina/o communities.
Suffice to say, I am very appreciative that I titled this new edited collection A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History. The word construction of “a promising problem” in the title, while it perhaps seems overly ironic, was one of the best ways I could concisely describe the very precarious balance we practitioners of Chicana/o history feel about working in a rich, growing, diverse, and intellectually promising field that, simultaneously, is the target of very public attacks and anti-Latina/o hysteria in the political sphere. As this 2016 election cycle continues, Chicana/o and Latina/o peoples and their issues will be front and center of the public debate as desired partners in electoral and governing success and also as being perceived as problems to be solved.
The essays in A Promising Problem add new insight into the Chicana/o past, present, and future. Transnationalism, civil rights activism, inter-Latina/o relations, the role of religion, the role of place and region such as the Nuevo South and the Midwest, and the production of culture and identity, are all important to understanding Chicana/o-Latina/o communities today in a very interdisciplinary sense. The history of these topics and more are intelligently explored in this collection. While A Promising Problem may not help anyone predict the next meaningful evening of voting, it will help readers understand Chicana/o-Latina/o people at the center of this presidential election and their pasts in fresh and insightful ways.
Today is Election Day and the news cycle is abuzz with pundits weighing in on projected outcomes both nationally and here in Texas. The first post-Perry gubernatorial race since the beginning of the new millennium is shaking up Texas politics as usual, with political star Wendy Davis up against Greg Abbott. It's a big election, so we invited Ross Ramsey of the Texas Tribune (happy belated birthday, y'all!) to talk with Wayne Thorburn (author of Red State) about how Texas politics got where it is today. This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune on October 10, 2014, here.
Analysis: In Democrats' Fall, a Lesson for GOP
by Ross Ramsey, The Texas Tribune
October 10, 2014
One of the people who steered Texas from a one-party Democratic state to a one-party Republican state sees some similarities between the Republican Party of the 1970s and 1980s and the Democrats of today.
Wayne Thorburn does not think Texas Democrats are ready to take back the state — not yet. But he does see some cautionary signs for his party in the Democrats’ fall.
Thorburn was executive director of the Republican Party of Texas from 1977 to 1983 — a period that saw both the 1978 election of the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction and the 1982 election that wiped out almost all of the Republican gains to that date. The 1982 election was the last time that Democrats swept the statewide elections in Texas.
He believes the Republicans were in better political condition when they began making serious inroads than the Democrats are today. Back then, the moderates among the Democrats — they were derided as conservatives — were increasingly out of ideological sync with Democrats on the national ticket. Texas has not sided with the Democratic presidential candidate since 1976. While Republicans then were gradually increasing turnout for their primary elections, Democrats today are seeing declining turnout for their primaries.
He does see some parallels. For instance, when the Democrats controlled the state, their infighting created an opportunity for John Tower, a Republican college professor, to win Lyndon B. Johnson’s former seat in the U.S. Senate in 1961. These days, infighting among Republican factions is common and often bitter; still, Democrats have not been able to crack the statewide blockade.
Thorburn does not believe that poses an immediate threat to the title of his book, Red State: An Insider’s Story of How the GOP Came to Dominate Texas Politics.
“Even though Tower broke the ice in 1961, it was not until 17 years later that Republicans were able to win,” he said. It took the better part of two more decades to reach a Republican sweep of statewide elections in 1996.
