Where did the Democrats go wrong with Latino voters? X marks the spot

My friend was in trouble. He was being grilled by the strictest nun in the school.

Sister Robert Mary demanded he give the Latin word for "speed" and its declension.

The correct answer is "Celeritas, celeritatis."

My friend didn't know that. He kept offering variations that failed to hit the mark.

After what seemed like 10 minutes, he finally got it right. Now all he had to do was state the gender.

"Celeritas, celeritatis – masculine," he said.

It is of course feminine, as any student of Latin would know.

But not him. We expected fireworks, double detentions or such.

Instead something amazing happened.

Sister Robert Mary started to laugh. For the rest of the semester she let him sit in the back of the class and draw pictures of Japanese bombers and American fighters.

At the end of the semester, she gave him a red X for a grade.

Ever since we've called him by the nickname: "X"

That's the grade I would give the Democratic Party after their debacle with Latinate languages.

Our Democratic friends seemed to think their use of the term "LatinX" to describe Latinos would win them points with Hispanic voters.

Instead exit polls showed that 45 percent of self-identified Hispanic voters went for Donald Trump.

Many of those voters said they were insulted by the effort of liberal elites to impose the gender-neutral term "LatinX" on a language in which every noun has a gender.

"The woke stuff doesn't work," said Jose Gomez Rivera, a former State Department employee who used to teach at Rutgers-Newark but recently relocated to Texas. "We hate 'LatinX.' Spanish is a gender-based language. You can't change that."

No, you can't. Back in my days studying Latin and French in high school, I recall wondering why the originators of Latin-based languages felt they had to impose a gender on every noun.

The Spanish words for "penis," for example' is "verga," which is feminine.

You want to change that? You'd have to go back a couple millennia.

As for me, when I go to Latin America, I'm content with the way things are.

And they're not the way my liberal friends think they are.

Consider the elections held earlier this year in one of my favorite Latin-American countries, El Salvador.

I was there in the war years, when ironically it was safe to travel around.

But when the war ended, the young people who had returned from places like Los Angeles decided to create gangs based on the L.A. model. The MS-13 gangs terrorized the country – until a right-winger was elected president in 2019.

Nayib Bukele went after the gangs with tactics such as cordoning off neighborhoods where MS-13 collected "rents" from merchants, and arresting anyone suspected of gang ties.

They weren't hard to find. Many had gang tattoos on their faces.

Civil-liberties advocates objected, but El Salvador went from being one of the most dangerous countries in the Americas to one of the safest, with a murder rate lower than every country except Canada.

Earlier this year Bukele was returned to office with 83 percent of the vote.

So much for the myth that Latin Americans are naturally left-wingers.

"You're not gonna get their vote with this constant harping on the woke agenda," said Gomez Rivera, who lives near Austin. "In Texas where I live, the blue areas are disappearing."

The blue areas on the border are also shrinking, said Rick Cavazos. Cavazos is a retired Border Patrol agent who is the former mayor of the border town of Los Indios.

When I phoned him to discuss the recent Democratic debacle with the Hispanic vote, he cited the turnaround in Starr County, a border area with 97 percent Hispanic population.

No Republican had carried that county since 1896, but Trump carried it comfortably this year.

"There was a lot of chaos there during the Biden years," said Cavazos. "Latinos want law and order down there, too. That's why Starr County flipped."

And when it comes to immigration, many Texans resent the newcomers, he said.

"People are like, 'My relatives had to wait; why are all these people jumping the line?'" Cavazos said.

They won't be line-jumping much longer, he said.

"Morale is through the roof" at the Border Patrol, he said. "I hear that from my old colleagues. They know what to expect."

What they expect is a crackdown that will be backed up by the mandate Trump won at the polls, Cavazos said. The Donald has appointed an immigration czar of his own, Tom Homan, who has 30 years' experience in Immigration and Customs.

Cavazos said Homan will make it a first priority to coordinate with the politicians who runs sanctuary cities to make sure inmates with criminal records get deported upon release.

Trump couldn't do that in his first term.

But a lot of Latin-American voters seem to have changed since then.

There must be a word for that.

But it certainly wouldn't be one you can't pronounce in Spanish.