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Bush nominee divides Latinos
By KATHERINE CORCORAN
San Jose Mercury News
January 9, 2005
SAN JOSE, Calif. - The nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be the first
U.S. attorney general of Latino heritage has split Latino legal and
civil rights organizations. The Mexican-American, whose contentious
confirmation hearing opened Thursday, also has caused hand-wringing
among other advocacy groups that push to integrate the highest echelons
of power, but question the politics of the man making the breakthrough.
President Bush's elevation of Gonzales, 49, harks back to the first
President Bush's 1991 nomination of Clarence Thomas, an
ultra-conservative African-American, to the U.S. Supreme Court.
But while most civil rights groups eventually opposed Thomas as not
befitting the legacy of Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice
impaneled in 1967, the significance of a conservative Latino securing
the highest law enforcement post in the land is evoking a far more
complicated response.
The National Council of La Raza and the League of United Latin American
Citizens, the largest and oldest Latino civil rights groups, both
support Gonzales for the post.
Vehemently opposed to the lawyer from San Antonio are the Mexican
American Political Association, La Raza Centro Legal and a host of San
Francisco Bay Area-based groups.
And still other organizations, such as the Mexican American Legal
Defense and Educational Fund and the La Raza Lawyers of California, are
taking a wait-and-see approach.
"The quandary is having fought for access or representation, then the
person there has a Hispanic appearance or Hispanic surname, but the
positions he upholds run counter to the goals of the organizations"
waging the fight, said Maria Blanco, executive director of the Lawyers
Committee for Civil Rights.
Monday, the San Francisco-based group will lead a press conference of
California Latino leaders opposing Gonzales, who attended the Air Force
Academy and holds a law degree from Harvard.
In Thursday's testy confirmation hearing, senators praised Gonzales,
son of Mexican immigrants, for his up-from-poverty, American Dream
tenacity, while grilling him on his positions on torture and treatment
of prisoners of war. Some said his memo authorizing Bush to sidestep
the Geneva Conventions rules on torture set the stage for abuses in
Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and among detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Gonzales sought to dispel those concerns, saying he denounces torture
and as attorney general would uphold international treaties and law.
The splintering over Gonzales, some say, reflects the diversity among
Latinos - nearly 40 million Americans across the political spectrum -
who traditionally have tended to vote Democratic, but are increasingly
turning independent or Republican. While 88 percent of African-American
voters, for example, supported Democrat John Kerry, as many as 44
percent of Latinos voted for Bush.
"Any organizations that would oppose Alberto Gonzales are outside the
mainstream of Hispanic Americans," said Leo Lacayo, a San Francisco
immigration consultant and communications chair of the Northern
California Republican National Hispanic Assembly. "How can you oppose a
person born in extreme poverty who moved himself up and has served our
country brilliantly?"
San Jose State Professor Louis Holscher agrees that Gonzales draws
support from a broad range of Mexican-Americans and explains why that
might be.
"`This guy is one of us.' He's from a working-class family in Texas,
and he doesn't seem to have cut his bridges with the community like
Clarence Thomas did," said Holscher, chair of the Mexican American
Studies Department.
The League of United Latin American Citizens would prefer a more
progressive attorney general "who would push the envelope on our
issues," said Brent Wilkes, executive director.
"If your interest is diversity in the administration regardless of
whether it's Democratic or Republican, and you want to make sure you
have a moderate who's not hostile toward our issues, then Al Gonzales
is a great pick," he said. "He's about as good as we can expect from
the Bush administration."
Opponents argue that Gonzales should be evaluated on his legal
positions, not his ethnicity. But coming out against a historic
appointment for a traditionally underrepresented population can create
a special kind of anguish, said Eva
Paterson, executive director of the Equal Justice Society, which
also opposes Gonzales.
"For a Latino, it's `Why are you trashing this fellow Latino?'" said
Paterson, who is African-American. "For a black person, given tensions
between blacks and browns, we don't want to make the tensions worse."
Paterson added, "It speaks eloquently about how messed up we still are
about race."
The hand-picking of a conservative Latino is how "George W. artfully
plays the race card," she said. "If this guy was white, there wouldn't
be any question about opposing him."
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