Victor Carrillo recently learned how welcomed he was in the Republican party. He had previously been appointed to the Railroad Commission here in Texas by Governor Perry. He was the chairman of the three member panel. On Tuesday, Mr. Carrillo was defeated in the Republican primary. Republicans are madly scrambling around trying to explain the reason for his loss, other than what it really was, but it doesn’t exactly take a mental giant to figure it out.
First lets look at what the position does. It sounds obscure but it actually has huge responsibilities and power since it is the regulatory board for such things as oil, gas, natural gas, surface mining, pipelines and quite a bit more. So what qualifications did Victor Carrillo have? Well, he’d been a councilman, a judge, an attorney, and had been a petroleum geophysicist. Wow! Impressive resume! His opponent must have really been something to take him out.
So what kind of qualifications did his opponent have? He is an accountant in Midland, Texas, that’s it, nothing more. For those who don’t know Midland is a tiny little town in Texas. It’s population as of 2008 was 129,494. How could this unqualified nobody beat out Carrillo? Did he out spend him? No, Carrillo poured $620,000 into his campaign while his opponent spent $33,000. I’ll quit holding back and tell you what he did have. He had a last name of Porter. His Anglo last name immediately made him better qualified than someone with a Hispanic last name. Those are Republican politics, always have been and it sure appears they always will be.
To be fair, this was Victor Carrillo’s second primary for the position he held. He did win the one before but there were three Anglo males running against him. They pulled enough votes from each other to allow him to actually win. This time he, and the State of Texas, had the misfortune of him only having one Anglo opponent.
But who knows, maybe the voters got it right. Maybe he isn’t as smart as he appears on paper. After all, he did believe he was more than just a token Hispanic in the Republican party. I wonder if he’s finally realized that to them he was just another Mexican taking a job away from an Anglo?
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My nieces and nephews live in Texas. Some were born there, of other Texans, of other Texans who were originally Mexicans. They have black hair, brown skin and dark eyes, but they speak perfect English and no Spanish, as good Texans do. They insult each other’s “latinoness” with their little anglo or black friends, who laugh even louder. All their negative traits, laziness, lack of incentive, inability to get a job, are blamed on their “latino” ancestry, yet they will proudly tell you they are not Mexicans, they are Texans! They speak with the same disdain about those, “filthy, thieving illegals” and join in the trashing of people who speak with accents. They are so rejected in the anglo world that they have taken on the black identity, playing their music, talking their slang and wearing their styles, as so many young Chicanos do. The message here is, it is better to be a black wannabe then a Hispanic. I see this in New York, with the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. They don’t realize they have clung to the black identity because the whites wont’ let them in. They convince themselves that they are hipper, cooler, whatever, for adapting this false identity. What is the danger here? With the recent rash of beatings and killings of Latinos, just for looking Latino and being one of the “it’s hip to hate them” crowd, it may be safer for young Latinos to emulate Americans, any Americans, but in doing so, they must take up the same hateful attitude that their non-Hispanic community puts forth, therby actually hating themselves, their parents and all their ancestry. And what does this do their self esteem? The same thing the Republicans just did to Carillo. Remind him that after all his education, experience and cowtowing to their total disenfranchisement of his people, he was just another “spick”. Lesson learned? Not yet. But when the final tally is taken, and the Republican-White wannabees find themselves out in the cold with the rest of us, maybe then. Fairy tales are hard to let go of, especially when you have abandoned all of your own reality. Good for the Texans. Maybe when they really come out of the closet and show their true colors, Hispanics will understand where they really stand and get off their knees.