According to a wide-ranging report by the organization America's Voice on Latino voters and this year's elections, those born in other countries whose primary language is Spanish make up the sector of our community most vulnerable to the siren song of the Republicans and conservatives. 

This is nothing new, since Republican strategists have for many years concentrated on recruiting partisans among the people of this sector, raising their share of the Latino vote by a factor of two between 1996 and 2004.  In the 2004 presidential election, George W. Bush got 48 percent of the Spanish-speaking Latino vote due to his apparent familiarity with immigrants and his promises to reform the immigration system. 

Of course it is true that there always has been and always will be a certain percentage of right-wing or independent Latinos who vote whichever way the wind blows.  This is natural and even healthy, so that the Democratic Party does not take our votes for granted in one election after another. 

But things have changed.  We are now in the year 2010, and the Republican Party is no longer what it was.  It becomes more and more rigid every day, as it finds itself trapped among the gears of the extreme right wing, which has been foaming at the mouth since the election of Barack Obama. 

The level of hatred and racism that permeates the right wing of this country's political structure is terrifying.  To put it bluntly, my brothers and sisters, these people do not like us; they do not respect us, and if it were up to them they would throw every one of us out of the country, documents or no documents. 

The members of the Tea Party, the new extreme-right movement that grew out of the reaction to healthcare reform, beat their own chests declaring themselves more patriotic than George Washington and dub themselves "the real American people." 

At the convention they held last week in Tennessee, ex-Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), the loudest and most insulting of the 10 horsemen of the anti-immigrant apocalypse, said in a speech that those who were guilty of putting Obama, "a socialist ideologue," in the White House, were illiterate voters who do not even know how to pronounce the word vote in English.  This last seems to me somewhat comic, since the word vote is spelled the same in both languages, and there is little difference in pronunciation.  I am sure that Tancredo did not take Spanish courses in high school. 

Neither does Tancredo appear to be aware that naturalized citizens have to take an examination on [U.S.] history and citizenship, since he also mentioned that the old voter requirements ought to be reinstated, the same requirements that were used five decades ago to keep poor whites and African Americans away from the polls in several southern states. 

Spanish-speaking Latinos have an obligation to themselves to learn something about wolves before they enter their dens.  Many of them, perhaps, feel that they are stuck in a dead-end street, and therefore the Spanish communications media must mount a more intensive and sustained effort to orient them.