“Republicans face uphill battle in winning Hispanic vote,” stressed a recent headline in the Boston Globe.

In Cambridge for a conference and a board meeting for the Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy, it struck me that this tension been Latinos and the GOP is an old issue — one that has fluctuated in importance for at least the last one hundred years.

The Globe, New England’s premier paper, began with story of Congressman Henry Bonilla, a Republican who lost his Texas seat in 2006 due to the toxic GOP brand.

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Salt of the Earth portrays the Empire Zinc strike miners in New Mexico that turned into a celebrated historic struggle for Mexican American and women’s equality. It was shot on location in 1953 by blacklisted filmmakers.

Salt of the Earth movie poster

The miners were members of the CIO’s International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW) Local 890. The politically active union was among the first to address the problem of discrimination on the job and in the community.

Last summer I traveled to the Silver City, New Mexico mining district to get a better feel for the strike and to research the union’s political activities during the 1940s.

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Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first Republican presidential candidate to reach out to Latino voters.

Eisenhower was the first Republican to court and to win Latino support.

Latinos con Eisenhower operated out of a national headquarters in the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. in 1952. The campaign stressed the themes of representation, justice and opportunity.

John A. Flores served as the national director. His business card in the Eisenhower presidential library and archives in Kansas indicates that Flores was a public relations counselor with offices in Mexico City, Washington, D.C. and Phoenix, Arizona.

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