By Elizabeth Llorente
June 29, 2015
Latino
media advocacy leaders say NBC’s decision Monday to end its business
ties with presidential candidate Donald Trump because of his denigrating
comments about Mexicans marked a watershed moment for Latinos.
“Things
are never going to be the same,” said Alex Nogales, the president and
CEO of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, a Latino media advocacy
group, about Latino empowerment. “When have we seen Latinos come out so
quickly and strongly against something, and get a result so quickly?”
Nogales’
group was part of a coalition of 39 Latino advocacy organizations that
called on NBC to get out of business with Trump. Similarly, a petition
urging the same thing on the Change.orgwebsite had gathered more than
218,000 signatures as of Monday afternoon.
“Latino
leadership mobilized in a lot of different areas, from the West coast
to the East coast and every point in between,” Nogales said. “And a
young [Hispanic] took it upon himself to start a petition online that
got more than 200,000 signatures."
There’s
a feeling in the Latino community like the scene [from the movie
'Network'] where people start shouting ‘I'm mad as hell and I’m not
going to take it anymore!
- Alex Nogales, National Hispanic Media Coalition
"There’s
a feeling in the Latino community like the scene [from the movie
'Network'] where people start shouting ‘I'm mad as hell and I’m not
going to take it anymore!’”
Nogales sees NBC's response to pressure from Latinos as a game-changer in how vocal and activist Latino will be going forward.
"Once
you taste victory and you know you can do it, you become more
vehement," Nogales said, "not only about messages in the media about the
Latino community, but about every other issue that comes up as well."
During
his presidential kickoff speech, Trump, who is one of more than a dozen
Republicans who have launched a presidential campaign, said Mexican
immigrants are "bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists
and some, I assume, are good people."
He
called for building a wall along the southern border of the United
States. In news interviews immediately afterward, Trump defended his
words, often even sharing more condemning views about Mexicans. Trump
later said that his remarks were directed at U.S. policymakers, not the
Mexican government or its people.
Spanish-language
television media giant Univision quickly announced that it would not
broadcast the Miss USA nor Miss Universe pageants, of which Trump is an
owner, despite a five-year contract to do so.
Feliz
Sanchez, chairman of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts,
which also is part of the coalition pressuring NBC to break ties with
Trump, said NBC’s decision resulted from “civil rights leadership in the
digital age."
He said momentum for a backlash against Trump developed on the Internet and exploded there.
“What
happened is that there was a groundswell of social media that led to
this conclusion,” Sanchez said. “Univision read the tea leaves first,
and before it got out of control, they acted. It took NBC longer. But in
three days over 200,000 people signed the petition on Change.org asking
NBC to halt its business relationship with Trump – it put NBC in a
precarious position.”
“The
Latino community made it very clear that if you own [Spanish network]
Telemundo and your principal audience is Latino, you can’t keep going in
a direction in which you normally would go, you have got to change and
follow the Latino community.”
NBC broadcasts as well as co-owns the pageants with the Trump Organization.
On
Friday, Nogales met with NBC executives to discuss diversity both in
front and behind the camera. The executives included NBC Entertainment
Chairman Bob Greenblatt, and NBC Entertainment President Jennifer Salke.
Before the meeting concluded, Nogales raised the issue of Trump.
“I
said ‘What Trump has said about Latinos,’” he recounted. “I said ‘You
have the Miss Universe pageant. We urge you to drop him and drop his
show.’”
“Who
is going to tolerate that” barrage of insults, Nogales said. “The guy
hasn’t heard us, he hasn’t accepted that that kind of hate speech and
those views aren’t going to be tolerated. We were [at the same time] as a
nation going through a discussion about the Confederate flag and
[symbols] of hate.”
On Monday morning, NBC executives called Nogales to tell him that they indeed were ending their ties to Trump.
“This was very welcome news,” Nogales said.
Both
Sanchez and Nogales said political leaders, notably the presidential
candidates, virtually ignored the firestorm that Trump’s remarks
unleashed among Latinos.
“On
one hand, people think of Donald Trump as a joke,” Sanchez said, “but
when you announce that you’re running for president and in that
announcement you defame 54 million Latinos in the United States, you
cannot dismiss what that person says.”
“You
didn’t get someone like Jeb Bush, whose wife is Mexican, and whose
children are half Mexican, immediately going after Trump, as he should
have,” Sanchez said. “None of the Republican presidential contenders
confronted him, nor did the chairman of the Republican National
Committee put his foot down.”
The Democrats, Sanchez said, did not fare too much better.
“The
Democrats’ strategy was ‘Let Trump play out, and let it build such
animosity among Latinos that they won’t vote Republican and will stay in
the Democrat column,’” Sanchez said. “But the strategy is at our
expense.”
“Democrats
expect us to take it because they may benefit,” he added. “It’s an
example of both parties wanting power and profit from the Latino
community.”
For his part, Nogales says the silence among presidential candidates as Trump offended Latinos will come back to haunt them.
"It
can be used against them," he said. "We'll ask 'Where were you when we
asked you to stand up with us for what is right?' They were nowhere
around, and then you want our vote?"
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment