lipsy

Hahaha. I work in a blue-collar trade, and I'd probably need a Y-shaped stick and a big helping of divine intervention to dig up ONE person in my trade who voted Dem this year. And I'm in Southern California.

The Mexican-Amerlcans in my ≈55% Latino, ≈40-45% Mex-Am neighborhood also flipped red in maaaddd numbers this year. Lemme tell You all, this had every bit as much—if not more—to do with being "latinx"ed for 2-3 solid fucking years, and just unceremoniously dumped into the same mental bucket as Cubans in Florida (and even Tejano Mexican-Americans in the Rio Grande Valley, who are nothing like Californios politically), from afar by Dems who were just too good to ever show up here and MEET them, than it ever had to do with staunch Catholic social conservatism[§].

You know who came here to meet Californio Mexicans? Donald Trump came here. He also went to the South Bronx, East Oakland, 3rd Ward New Orleans, Orange Mound, and Opa-Locka to hang out with Black voters and just... talk to them, and LISTEN to them.

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[§]: Zzzlong as we're here... Imputing "staunch Catholic social conservatism" to the average Mexican (or to the average Mexican immigrant to the US, or to the average Mexican-American—n.b. these are three wildly different average profiles) is another colossal fuck-up. In the same way you don't rlly find U.S. revanchist Evangelical "prepper" weirdos with 64 guns and 7 teeth apiece outside that one mostly-empty blotch of Idaho and Montana, you don't rlly find a whole lot of staunchly conservative, devoutly Catholic influence on Mexican politics outside the Frontera Norte — i.e., the strip of northern states along the Calif/Arizona/N.M./Texas border. (Sure there are more devout Catholics all across Mexico than you can shake a stick at, but, outside of the Frontera Norte, they tend to maintain a commitment to secular politics, as most Catholics worldwide have done for centuries.)

Just so that nobody reading this comment underestimates juuuust how different the Frontera Norte is from the entire rest of Mexico: When the Mexican Supreme Court decreed the legalization of same sex marriage in 2009 (n.b.: six years earlier than this happened in the USA), there was a genuinely earnest Nortexit movement—where, for a tenuous few months, that northern strip of Catholic Redoubt states came VERY close to declaring secession and independence from the rest of Mexico. It didn't ultimately happen, of course, but the point is... MOST of Mexico is not at all a Catholic so-con haven, and indeed the US itself has lagged behind its southern neighbor on iconic liberal social causes like LGB rights. (Mexico has the same system of federalism as the USA, with states making and enforcing almost all their own laws—in fact, Mexico's constitution was very closely and deliberately modeled on the American one—so there's the same wild diversity of political valences among Mexican states as there is among U.S. states. At least two states in southern Mexico, Guerrero and Oaxaca, are even more trans-captured than Washington state or California has ever been, if You can believe that!)