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Stateside this year was the year Republicans discovered the Latino vote and started speaking Spanish. You could perceive in the Republican approach a kind of a Southern Latino strategy. That is, they basically wrote off the Northeast because they felt it wasn't worth campaigning up here because it was so dependent or so supportive of the Democratic Party that they really didn't have too much play here. Actually, there wasn't much campaigning or reaching out to the Latino community. We saw that with the Hillary Clinton campaign as well that this was, as one person was quoted in The New York Times, kind of like a foreign election to Latinos in general because there was a lot of marketing, very little substance and discussion about policy. Everybody said the same thing.
But within that whole context, because of where we're concentrated as Puerto Ricans, we were also an invisible part of the Latino electorate. People really weren't looking at Puerto Ricans per se as a group to go after and plus the hot issues were controversial issues -- the Puerto Rican political prisoners, Vieques, you know, you had un loco ahi trépandose encima del Statue of Liberty. They don't know what the hell to do with us. So we really weren't [and] our issues really weren't that visible within this election either.
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in partnership with the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College 
