Denver is celebrating Cinco de Mayo this weekend. My wife and I dropped in fairly early yesterday before things got crowded. The chihuahua race was lit, I will tell you.
Cinco de Mayo isn’t a statuatory holiday in Mexico, and when I was growing up my (Mexican-American) mom always thought it was a gringo holiday. Over the years, it’s become a time where Mexican-Americans and Mexicans living in the US can celebrate their culture, and, judging from yesterday’s festivities, it’s also where gringos can have margs, tacos and beer.
There are close to 40 million US citizens of Mexican descent living in the US, as well as roughly 11 million Mexican-born non-citizens. Mexican-Americans are roughly 1/3 of the population of California, New Mexico and Texas. You’d think that 40 million people, who make up 60% of the Hispanic voters in the US, and sizable voting blocs in some states, would get some attention as Mexicans, apart from being Hispanics, but they get lumped together at a national level.
The riddle of Mexican-American voting patterns is something that Democrats seem to be constantly trying and failing to solve. We’re told that Mexicans are “conservative,” but the Mexican-Americans in the area around Tucson where my mother was born send one of the most liberal members of Congress to Washington (formerly Raul and now Adelita Grijalva). It’s interesting to me that the borders of the Gadsden Purchase of 1854 roughly aligns with the most Democratic part of Arizona:
New Mexico is also pretty blue, and very Mexican, as is El Paso. But as you travel south along the Rio Grande in Texas, the valley there swung hard for Trump. Since these areas have a lot of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, perhaps one key to the puzzle is the politics of the bordering Mexican states. Arizona is bordered by Sonora, which has Morena (Claudia Sheinbaum and AMLO’s party) leadership. Most of New Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley is bordered by Chihuahua (PAN - conservative leadership), Coahuila (PRI - conservative), Nuevo Leon (Citizens’ Movement - center/left) and a sliver of Tamaulipis (Morena). It would be interesting politically to do a deeper dive into the background of Mexicans living in different areas of the US to see if there’s a correlation between the politics of their home region and the politics of the Mexicans in a given area. Claudia wiped the floor with her opponents in the 2024 election, winning all but one state, but even at that, it’s pretty clear that the southern part of Mexico is more “liberal” than the northern part.
Anyway, I don’t really have a point other than we don’t know a hell of a lot about whatever portion of the 40 million Mexican-Americans are of voting age. So, I’ll leave you with a fun story from the House race in south Texas’ TX-15. Tejano music star Bobby Pulido is the Democrat in the race. His opponent, the incumbent Republican, said this:
“This election isn’t about who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera,” said De La Cruz, R-Edinburg. “It’s about who you trust with your family’s future. After years of neglect, South Texas finally has a seat at the table, and we’re not going to jeopardize that.”
In case you don’t know, a quinceañera is a kind of coming out party for 15 year old girls. Pulido did something clever in response:
Pulido put out an open call for invitations to perform at quinceañeras across Texas’ 15th Congressional District, which stretches from east of San Antonio to the Rio Grande Valley and is Democrats’ top target in Texas. His campaign received more than 1,000 requests in the first 24 hours, and in the weeks since, people have also been asking Pulido to perform at birthday parties, bar mitzvahs and graduations, he said, noting that the requests now number more than 2,700.
After he performs, Pulido gives the girl an autographed pink “Make Quinceañeras Great Again” hat:
The New Yorker has a long profile of the race. It’s going to be tough one in an R+7 district, but I’m sure Pulido is connecting with a lot of Mexican-Americans who wouldn’t go to a political rally, but would attend their niece’s quince. Good luck to him.
