Senator Mel Martinez and GOP Moderates

Posted on September 18, 2011 by Ken

The most prominent Hispanic elected official during the past decade was U.S. senator Mel Martinez from Florida. His life story, his ubiquitous presence on Spanish-language television, and his close association with President George W. Bush gave him a tremendous cache.

New biography tells a wonderful personal story and provides a powerful warning to the Republican Party on why they have trouble courting Hispanics.

Martinez’s story is chronicled in Richard E. Foglesong’s new biography, Immigrant Prince: Mel Martinez and the American Dream(University Press of Florida, 2011).

A page-turner, Immigrant Prince is both heartwarming and coldly analytical in examining the man who, for many, came to encapsulate the American Dream as well as the failed Republican Party’s efforts to incorporate Hispanics into a “big tent.”

The story begins in Cuba in 1962 where, at age 15, Martinez bids farewell to his parents and friends and heads for the United States in one of the opening acts in a drama known as Operation Peter Pan, a now-famous resettlement program run by the Catholic Church.

But instead of being dropped off in the growing Cuban enclave of Miami, as was the experience of most Peter Panners, he was placed with Anglo foster families in Orlando, a central Florida community with few ethnic residents. Continue reading →

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Photos of Robert Kennedy and Cesar Chavez

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Ken

Professor Frank Barajas at California State University Channel Islands has a nice blog that focuses, in large measure, on Latino history in Ventura County. Two of my favorite posts on his site feature historic photos from Oxnard. One is of Cesar Chavez and other Community Service Organization activists encouraging voters to go to the polls in 1958. The other is from a decade later. Robert F. Kennedy is captured praying in a little church in the Colonia a few days before his assassination in 1968.

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Latino Political Activism in Iowa

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Ken

Every wondered how Latino politics developed one of the Midwest’s smaller communities?

Janet Weaver’s article on Mexican American activism in Davenport, Iowa, is a gem.

She interviewed activists who were involved in the United Farm Workers’ boycott committee in the late sixties and early seventies and traced their political development back to the 1940s and 1950s.

Not surprisingly, she found that a number of key leaders had been involved in CIO-affiliated unions and that the UFW militancy harkened back to the glory days of industrial unionism.

The activists had also been active in a variety of civil rights and political organizations. These included the GI Forum and LULAC, social justice groups associated with the Catholic Church, Viva Kennedy, and the Midwest Council of La Raza. They also lobbied state legislatures on behalf of migrant farm workers.

Henry Vargas served on the first Davenport Human Relations Committee, and John Terronez was the first Mexican American appointee on the Iowa State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Here is the author-provided link to her article, “From Barrio to ‘Boicoteo!’: The Emergence of Mexican American Activism in Davenport, 1917–1970,” in The Annals of Iowa 68 (Summer 2009).

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