The Trouble with Unity

Some of my post-election thoughts went into an essay for NBC Latino. "…[R]ather than a monolithic cultural
community, Latinos are in fact a series of communities. At times these
populations display widespread agreement, as on Nov. 6. Support for
Obama in the 2012 presidential election is an excellent example of
Latinos expressing a shared political preference. But it hardly means
that Latinos constitute a singular or united political community with a
distinct policy agenda. Nor are they a
politically passive population, a 'sleeping giant'
that just happened to wake up on Election Day. Latinos are quite simply
part of America’s political community—current and future citizens with
ideas and opinions, an electorate that has finally reached a demographic
threshold at which their numbers allow them to impact the outcome of
state and federal elections."